If you go exploring the Unicode Standard, you may be surprised to find that there are some characters that have case distinction yet are themselves neither uppercase nor lowercase.<\/p>\n
Oooooh, spooky.<\/p>\n
In other words, it is a character c<\/var> with the properties that<\/p>\n Congratulations, you found the mysterious third case: Title case.<\/p>\n There are some Unicode characters that occupy a single code point but represent two graphical symbols packed together. For example, the Unicode character \u01f3 (U+01F1 LATIN SMALL LETTER DZ), looks like two Unicode characters placed next to each other: dz (U+0064 LATIN SMALL LETTER D followed by U+007A LATIN SMALL LETTER Z).<\/p>\n These diagraphs are characters in the alphabets of some languages, most notably Hungarian. In those languages, the diagraph is considered a separate letter of the alphabet. For example, the first ten letters of the Hungarian alphabet are\u00b9<\/p>\n These digraphs (and one trigraph) have three forms.<\/p>\n Unicode includes four diagraphs in its encoding.<\/p>\n But wait, we have a Unicode code point for the dz digraph, but we don’t have one for the cs digraph or the dzs trigraph. What’s so special about dz?<\/p>\n These digraphs owe their existence in Unicode not to Hungarian but to Serbo-Croatian. Serbo-Croatian is written in both Latin script (Croatian) and Cyrillic script (Serbian), and these digraphs permit one-to-one transliteration between them.\u00b9<\/p>\n Just another situation where the world is more complicated than you think. You thought you understood uppercase and lowercase, but there’s another case in between that you didn’t know about.<\/p>\n Bonus chatter<\/b>: The fact that dz is treated as a single letter in Hungarian means that if you search for “mad”, it should not match “madzag<\/span>” (which means “string”) because the “dz” in “madzag<\/span>” is a single letter and not a “d” followed by a “z”, no more than “lav” should match “law” just because the first part of the letter “w” looks like a “v”. Another surprising result if you mistakenly use a literal substring search rather than a locale-sensitive one. We’ll look at locale-sensitive substrings searches next time.<\/p>\n\n
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\n a<\/td>\n \u00e1<\/td>\n b<\/td>\n c<\/td>\n cs<\/td>\n d<\/td>\n dz<\/td>\n dzs<\/td>\n e<\/td>\n \u00e9<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n \n\n
\n Form<\/th>\n Result<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n \n Uppercase<\/td>\n \u01f1<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Title case<\/td>\n \u01f2<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Lowercase<\/td>\n \u01f3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n \n\n
\n Uppercase<\/th>\n Title case<\/th>\n Lowercase<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n \n \u01c4<\/td>\n \u01c5<\/td>\n \u01c6<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n \u01c7<\/td>\n \u01c8<\/td>\n \u01c9<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n \u01ca<\/td>\n \u01cb<\/td>\n \u01cc<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n \u01f1<\/td>\n \u01f2<\/td>\n \u01f3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n