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copied!<p>Unfortunately, it is impossible for a machine to upcase/downcase/capitalize properly. It needs way too much contextual information for a computer to understand.</p> <p>That's why Ruby's <code>String</code> class only supports capitalization for ASCII characters, because there it's at least <em>somewhat</em> well-defined.</p> <p>What do I mean by "contextual information"?</p> <p>For example, to capitalize <code>i</code> properly, you need to know which language the text is in. English, for example, has only two <code>i</code>s: capital <code>I</code> without a dot and small <code>i</code> with a dot. But Turkish has four <code>i</code>s: capital <code>I</code> without a dot, capital <code>İ</code> with a dot, small <code>ı</code> without a dot, small <code>i</code> with a dot. So, in English <code>'i'.upcase # => 'I'</code> and in Turkish <code>'i'.upcase # => 'İ'</code>. In other words: since <code>'i'.upcase</code> can return two different results, depending on the language, it is obviously impossible to correctly capitalize a word without knowing its language.</p> <p>But Ruby doesn't know the language, it only knows the encoding. Therefore it is impossible to properly capitalize a string with Ruby's built-in functionality.</p> <p>It gets worse: even <em>with</em> knowing the language, it is sometimes impossible to do capitalization properly. For example, in German, <code>'Maße'.upcase # => 'MASSE'</code> (<em>Maße</em> is the plural of <em>Maß</em> meaning <em>measurement</em>). However, <code>'Masse'.upcase # => 'MASSE'</code> (meaning <em>mass</em>). So, what is <code>'MASSE'.capitalize</code>? In other words: correctly capitalizing requires a full-blown Artificial Intelligence.</p> <p>So, instead of sometimes giving the wrong answer, Ruby chooses to sometimes give no answer <em>at all</em>, which is why non-ASCII characters simply get ignored in downcase/upcase/capitalize operations. (Which of course also reads to wrong results, but at least it's easy to check.)</p>

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