Do I need to cast to unsigned char before calling toupper(), tolower(), et al.?

Question

A while ago, someone with high reputation here on Stack Overflow wrote in a comment that it is necessary to cast a char-argument to unsigned char b

Answer 1

Yes, the argument to toupper needs to be converted to unsigned char to avoid the risk of undefined behavior.

The types char, signed char, and unsigned char are three distinct types. char has the same range and representation as either signed char or unsigned char. (Plain char is very commonly signed and able to represent values in the range -128..+127.)

The toupper function takes an int argument and returns an int result. Quoting the C standard, section 7.4 paragraph 1:

In all cases the argument is an int, the value of which shall be representable as an unsigned char or shall equal the value of the macro EOF . If the argument has any other value, the behavior is undefined.

(C++ incorporates most of the C standard library, and defers its definition to the C standard.)

The [] indexing operator on std::string returns a char value. If plain char is a signed type, and if the value returned by name[0] happens to be negative, then the expression

toupper(name[0])

has undefined behavior.

The language guarantees that, even if plain char is signed, all members of the basic character set have non-negative values, so given the initialization

string name = "Niels Stroustrup";

the program doesn't risk undefined behavior. But yes, in general a char value passed to toupper (or to any of the functions declared in <cctype> / <ctype.h>) needs to be converted to unsigned char, so that the implicit conversion to int won't yield a negative value and cause undefined behavior.

The <ctype.h> functions are commonly implemented using a lookup table. Something like:

// assume plain char is signed
char c = -2;
c = toupper(c); // undefined behavior

may index outside the bounds of that table.

Note that converting to unsigned:

char c = -2;
c = toupper((unsigned)c); // undefined behavior

doesn't avoid the problem. If int is 32 bits, converting the char value -2 to unsigned yields 4294967294. This is then implicitly converted to int (the parameter type), which probably yields -2.

toupper can be implemented so it behaves sensibly for negative values (accepting all values from CHAR_MIN to UCHAR_MAX), but it's not required to do so. Furthermore, the functions in <ctype.h> are required to accept an argument with the value EOF, which is typically -1.

The C++ standard makes adjustments to some C standard library functions. For example, strchr and several other functions are replaced by overloaded versions that enforce const correctness. There are no such adjustments for the functions declared in <cctype>.

Answer 2

In C, toupper (and many other functions) take ints even though you'd expect them to take chars. Additionally, char is signed on some platforms and unsigned on others.

The advice to cast to unsigned char before calling toupper is correct for C. I don't think it's needed in C++, provided you pass it an int that's in range. I can't find anything specific to whether it's needed in C++.

If you want to sidestep the issue, use the toupper defined in <locale>. It's a template, and takes any acceptable character type. You also have to pass it a std::locale. If you don't have any idea which locale to choose, use std::locale(""), which is supposed to be the user's preferred locale:

#include <algorithm>
#include <iostream>
#include <iterator>
#include <locale>
#include <string>

int main()
{
    std::string name("Bjarne Stroustrup");
    std::string uppercase;

    std::locale loc("");

    std::transform(name.begin(), name.end(), std::back_inserter(uppercase),
                   [&loc](char c) { return std::toupper(c, loc); });

    std::cout << name << '\n' << uppercase << '\n';
    return 0;
}

Answer 3

The reference is referring to the value being representable as an unsigned char, not to it being an unsigned char. That is, the behavior is undefined if the actual value is not between 0 and UCHAR_MAX (typically 255). (Or EOF, which is basically the reason it takes an int instead of a char.)

Answer 4

Sadly Stroustrup was careless :-(
And yes, latin letters codes should be non-negative (and no cast are required)...
Some implementations correctly works without casting to unsigned char...
By the some experience, it may cost a several hours to find the cause of segfault of a such toupper (when it is known that a segfault are there)...
And there are also isupper, islower etc

Answer 5

Instead of casting the argument as unsigned char, you can cast the function. You will need to include functional header. Here's a sample code:

#include <string>
#include <algorithm>
#include <functional>
#include <locale>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    typedef unsigned char BYTE; // just in case

    std::string name("Daniel Brühl"); // used this name for its non-ascii character!

    std::transform(name.begin(), name.end(), name.begin(),
            (std::function<int(BYTE)>)::toupper);

    std::cout << "uppercase name: " << name << '\n';
    return 0;
}

The output is:

uppercase name: DANIEL BRüHL

As expected, toupper has no effect on non-ascii characters. But this casting is beneficial for avoiding unexpected behavior.