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by d1sxeyes 1434 days ago
.toUpper() is a quick and mostly effective way to normalise strings for comparison if you're not sure what case the two strings to compare are in (eg: one has been input by a user). Yes, it's a shortcut, and occasionally you'll end up with a miss, but it's good enough to work 99% of the time, and the alternative is a LOT of code and data changes to handle a very small proportion of cases.
1 comments
vesinisa 1434 days ago
Hmm I think you miss the point. In some programming environments (like C# and Java) .toUpper() is always incorrect in code unless you are displaying the resulting string in a UI, as it uses the "current locale", which is whatever the user has selected for the machine. When e.g. comparing strings case-insensitively, you should always explicitly specify the locale where the conversion should happen instead of relying on an external configuration variable.

JavaScript actually seems to be the smart one here - its default .toUpperCase() uses the "locale-insensitive case mappings in the Unicode Character Database".

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greenshackle2 1434 days ago
> the user has selected for the machine

I don't think most Java and C# software is desktop apps? Surely in most cases it's the locale selected for the server or VM, which should be consistent?

(I'm not saying it's good coding practice, mind you, but it probably ends up accidentally working in a lot of cases.)

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vesinisa 1434 days ago
You write like you can know how and where the code will get executed in the future. :) Do you think that the authors of Windows 95 ever imagined the system would one day get ported to an obscure subset of a functional scripting language (Asm.js variety of JavaScript), and get booted in a hyper-text browser running on a PDA device with internet connection (web browser on a smartphone)? Yet - here we are: https://win95.ajf.me/

> I'm not saying it's good coding practice, mind you, but it probably ends up accidentally working in most cases

Fully agree. It's still bad practice and I high-five every linter that automatically flags it.

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d1sxeyes 1434 days ago
I did indeed. Thanks - yes, I was referring to JavaScript's .toUpperCase(), silly oversight and assumption on my side.

Thanks for the correction!

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