Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Need advice from people who use non-ascii all day long

[Renat Golubchyk]

Hi!

On Thu, 3 Dec 2009 11:20:03 -0800
felix@×××××××.com wrote:
> In Germany is a district "Busingen", with an umlauted 'u'.  Is it
> reasonable to consider it the same word whether with or without the
> unlauted u?

No. For many words it would be ok, but not for all. For example,
"drucken" means "to print", "drücken" (with an umlaut) means "to
press". In German you can exchange an umlaut with the combination "base
letter + e", i.e. ü --> ue, ö --> oe, and ß --> ss. There are words
with the combination "oe" that is in that particular case does not mean
"ö". So it's not straight forward, especially with names. Those may
have a rather odd spelling for historical reasons.

> Or put another way, I don't know much about German, French, Spanish,
> etc keyboards.  Do your keyboards have any of the extra keys, all of
> them?  Are German keyboards and French and Spanish keyboards as
> restricted to their own languages as US keyboards are?  If you have to
> hit two or three keys to keep the umlauts, accents, and tildes, do you
> get lazy sometimes and type the base character by itself?  Is it even
> considered the base character, or is it considered lazy and sloppy,
> much as I get complaints about typing "thru" because "through" is too
> much trouble?

German keyboards have keys for all umlauts and 'ß'. You can google for
pictures of different keyboard layouts.

> I need something the equivalent of the C function strcasecmp() which
> not only ignores case, but all other differences without distinction,
> whatever they may be.

I'd suggest you use a unicode library. BTW, what about cyrillic
letters or other alphabets? Those may have nothing to do with ASCII. Or
is your project restricted to latin letters?


Cheers,
Renat

-- 
Probleme kann man niemals mit derselben Denkweise loesen,
durch die sie entstanden sind.
                                              (Einstein)