Re: Initcap works differently with different locale providers

On 04.08.25 22:59, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Mon, 2025-08-04 at 12:30 +0700, Oleg Tselebrovskiy wrote:
>> First patch just adds this warning about not relying on initcap()
>> exact
>> result. The second one is the same, but removes the part "what is a
>> word"
>> since it's could be moot because we recommend writing custom
>> functions,
>> so understanding what is a word is not exactly needed. Still on the
>> fence
>> about which patch is better, though
>
> One more thing: we should also change it to "... to upper case (or
> title case) and the rest to lower case...". Title case is for scripts
> that have characters like 'Dž' (U+01C5).
>
> Other than that I like the second version, which un-documents the
> specific word boundary rules. I'll admit I'm not quite sure how people
> use this function in practice, but I expect that it's mostly convenient
> (or lazy) display.

It's meant to be an Oracle-compatible function, so maybe someone can
check there for some details.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/18/sqlrf/INITCAP.html

I think we should try to document the behavior more precisely. But we
probably first have to agree what it should be.

> Alexander, is there a reason you backported this change? I don't
> normally backport doc improvements like this, but I'm not sure what
> standard others use. The fact that it's on 7 branches makes me more
> reluctant to commit these extra improvements on top. Can you take care
> of these follow-up patches? Or, just revert the change and I can make
> the improvements in master.

Yes, I was not in favor of backpatching this, since it was not a bug
fix. And it turns out it was incomplete. I think we should revert all
the backpatches and iterate on getting the documentation the way we want
in master.