[Proposal] Add ß --upcase--> ẞ

[Tobias Pfeiffer]

Hello all and thanks for all your work.

This isn't super important, but after wondering how ß, a German character that notoriously has no capital version, was treated I found a bit of a rabbit hole and found out that apparently since 2024 it _has_ a capital version "ẞ" which is now preferred. [1]

I wanted to suggest adding this to elixir. I'm not super familiar with the unicode support in elixir but I'd hope that that an update to `UnicodeData.txt` plus some updated tests [2] might do the job. I'm happy to do the work myself if not _too_ complex and would appreciate pointers.

The current behavior (1.18.3 @ OTP 27.3.2) is:

iex(1)> String.capitalize("ß") "Ss"

iex(2)> String.upcase("ß") "SS"

I don't know in general how other programming languages treat this now, the latest Ruby release has the same behavior as elixir.

Thanks so much, nothing urgent - just a fun exploration that came out of a conversation I had at Alchemyconf in Braga last week :)

Cheers,

Tobi

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F#Development_of_a_capital_form (yes I know wikipedia is my only source so far, I can check the German sources as well if wished)

[2] https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/main/lib/elixir/test/elixir/string_test.exs#L204

[José Valim]

Hi Tobias,

We strictly follow the Unicode rules here. So if new Unicode versions include this update, then it will automatically work in the future. If Unicode does not update, I don't believe there is anything we can do, because then we would no longer be Unicode compliant and diverge from all other tools and languages out there.

There is typically a new Unicode version every year, around September, so maybe it will be addressed once it is out and we update Elixir files!

José Valim

https://dashbit.co/

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[Tobias Pfeiffer]

Heyo José,

that's what I figured - just thought we might have missed a unicode update or so but probably not. Thanks for the quick response as always and I'll see what happens.

I checked and yeah the official unicode still goes to S apparently: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+00DF - should have checked before, sorry!

Have a great week!

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