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lowercase: Clarify situation for other languages #120

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lowercase: Clarify situation for other languages
Maia-Everett Aug 30, 2025
3dc9710
Remove no_run from Cyrillic example, not needed anymore
Maia-Everett Sep 4, 2025
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13 changes: 10 additions & 3 deletions src/strings_ii/lowercase.md
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Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
# lowercase

In English[^otherlangs] letters can be either lower-cased (`a`, `b`, `c`) or upper-cased (`A`, `B`, `C`).
In English, letters can be either lower-cased (`a`, `b`, `c`) or upper-cased (`A`, `B`, `C`).

If you have a `String` which potentially contains upper-cased letters, you can get a new `String` with everything
transformed into lower-case using the `.toLowerCase()` method.
Expand All @@ -16,6 +16,13 @@ void main() {

This does not change the original `String` in place. It just makes a new `String` with all lower-case letters.

What about other languages? Many of them also have a distinction between uppercase and lowercase, and usually, `.toLowerCase()` does the right thing for them too:

[^otherlangs]: Other languages also have a notion of case. I am not a polyglot though, so I'm not qualified
to talk about them.
```java
~void main() {
// Cyrillic
IO.println("ПРИВЕТ".toLowerCase()); // prints "привет"
~}
```

However, in different languages, the mapping between uppercase and lowercase characters can differ. For example, in Turkish, the lowercase form of the letter `I` is `ı` without a dot. By default, Java uses the rules for the language of the operating system, so `"I".toLowerCase()` will return `"i"` on an English system and `"ı"` on a Turkish one.