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Message-ID: <415a8ce2-7b15-4fd0-b82a-1d13aba754ed@eisentraut.org>
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2025 13:44:25 +0200
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Subject: Re: Initcap works differently with different locale providers
To: Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>,
 Oleg Tselebrovskiy <o.tselebrovskiy@postgrespro.ru>
Cc: Alexander Korotkov <aekorotkov@gmail.com>, pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
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From: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
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On 04.08.25 22:59, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Mon, 2025-08-04 at 12:30 +0700, Oleg Tselebrovskiy wrote:
>> First patch just adds this warning about not relying on initcap()
>> exact
>> result. The second one is the same, but removes the part "what is a
>> word"
>> since it's could be moot because we recommend writing custom
>> functions,
>> so understanding what is a word is not exactly needed. Still on the
>> fence
>> about which patch is better, though
> 
> One more thing: we should also change it to "... to  upper case (or
> title case) and the rest to lower case...". Title case is for scripts
> that have characters like 'ǅ' (U+01C5).
> 
> Other than that I like the second version, which un-documents the
> specific word boundary rules. I'll admit I'm not quite sure how people
> use this function in practice, but I expect that it's mostly convenient
> (or lazy) display.

It's meant to be an Oracle-compatible function, so maybe someone can 
check there for some details.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/18/sqlrf/INITCAP.html

I think we should try to document the behavior more precisely.  But we 
probably first have to agree what it should be.

> Alexander, is there a reason you backported this change? I don't
> normally backport doc improvements like this, but I'm not sure what
> standard others use. The fact that it's on 7 branches makes me more
> reluctant to commit these extra improvements on top. Can you take care
> of these follow-up patches? Or, just revert the change and I can make
> the improvements in master.

Yes, I was not in favor of backpatching this, since it was not a bug 
fix.  And it turns out it was incomplete.  I think we should revert all 
the backpatches and iterate on getting the documentation the way we want 
in master.