A Curious Case of Letter Case

An extremely common programming exercise – popping up usually as an interview question – is to write a function that turns all characters in a string into uppercase. As you may know or suspect, such task is not really about the problem stated explicitly. Instead, it’s meant to probe if you can program at all, and whether you remember about handling special subsets of input data. That’s right: the actual problem is almost insignificant; it’s all about the necessary plumbing. Without a need for it, the task becomes awfully easy, especially in certain kind of languages:

This simplicity may be a cause of misconception that the whole problem of letter case is similarly trivial. Actually, I would not be surprised if the notion of having any sort of real ‘problem’ here is baffling to some. After all, every self-respecting language has those toLowerCase/toUpperCase functions built-in, right?…

Sure it has. But even assuming they work correctly, they are usually the only case-related transformations available out of the box. As it turns out, it’s hardly uncommon to need something way more sophisticated.