Re: converting std::basic_string to upper or lower case.

Thanks

"Tom Widmer" <tom_usenet@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OL0qojJVFHA.3184@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Andy Coates wrote:
>> Apologies in advance on this one - I realise this is probably a common
>> question - but I can't seem to find a solution on the news groups.
>>
>> How would you convert a basic_string to upper-case in-place? In the past
>> I've always done it like so:
>>
>> std::string str1 = "My-/$%^Mixed_Case_String";
>> std::transform(str1.begin(), str1.end(), str1.begin(), ::toupper);
>>
>> However, a colleague of mine has just piped up to say he's had issues
>> with this where he was passing a mixed case string in and some of the
>> upper case characters were coming back messed up. He then quoted the
>> MSDN spiel on the ascii version of toupper:
>>
>> In order for toupper to give the expected results, __isascii and
>> islower must both return nonzero
>>
>> This suggests that if a character is already upper (i.e. islower returned
>> false) then the results are undefined. Is this right or is the
>> documentation in error? Seems mighty strange to me...
>
> The documentation is misleading at best. All of the is* and to* functions
> have as their domain positive values in the range supported by unsigned
> char, and EOF (and Microsoft appear to further limit this to characters
> 0-127 + EOF). So if you pass a negative char value it isn't going to be
> treated correctly (it's undefined behaviour, actually, unless it happens
> to equal EOF) - you should cast to unsigned char first. So, really you
> should use the locale one you use below.
>
>> One alternative I found was to use:
>> std::use_facet<std::ctype<char>
>> >(std::locale()).toupper(&*str1.begin(), &*str1.end());
>>
>> but this is hardly pleasing on the eye - and I'm not even sure it's
>> guaranteed to work as I can't remember off the top of my head if the
>> memory behind a basic_string is guaranteed to be continuous - I have a
>> nagging suspicions it's not and that only the memory returned from
>> c_str() is.
>
> Your suspicions are correct.
>
> The solution is to write a string toupper function, implementing it
> however you want (e.g. with a for loop, or an algorithm), so you don't
> have to worry about it ever again! Even better, use one that's been
> written for you: http://www.boost.org/doc/html/string_algo.html
>
> Tom


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