NAME

Raku port of Perl's lc() / uc() built-ins

SYNOPSIS

use P5lc;

say lc "FOOBAR"; # foobar
with "ZIPPO" {
    say lc();  # zippo, may need to use parens to avoid compilation error
}

say uc "foobar"; # FOOBAR
with "zippo" {
    say uc();  # ZIPPO, may need to use parens to avoid compilation error
}

DESCRIPTION

This module tries to mimic the behaviour of Perl's lc / uc built-ins as closely as possible in the Raku Programming Language.

ORIGINAL PERL 5 DOCUMENTATION

lc EXPR
lc      Returns a lowercased version of EXPR. This is the internal
        function implementing the "\L" escape in double-quoted strings.

        If EXPR is omitted, uses $_.

        What gets returned depends on several factors:

        If "use bytes" is in effect:
            The results follow ASCII rules. Only the characters "A-Z"
            change, to "a-z" respectively.

        Otherwise, if "use locale" (but not "use locale
        ':not_characters'") is in effect:
            Respects current LC_CTYPE locale for code points < 256; and
            uses Unicode rules for the remaining code points (this last
            can only happen if the UTF8 flag is also set). See perllocale.

            Starting in v5.20, Perl wil use full Unicode rules if the
            locale is UTF-8. Otherwise, there is a deficiency in this
            scheme, which is that case changes that cross the 255/256
            boundary are not well-defined. For example, the lower case of
            LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S (U+1E9E) in Unicode rules is
            U+00DF (on ASCII platforms). But under "use locale" (prior to
            v5.20 or not a UTF-8 locale), the lower case of U+1E9E is
            itself, because 0xDF may not be LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S in
            the current locale, and Perl has no way of knowing if that
            character even exists in the locale, much less what code point
            it is. Perl returns the input character unchanged, for all
            instances (and there aren't many) where the 255/256 boundary
            would otherwise be crossed.

        Otherwise, If EXPR has the UTF8 flag set:
            Unicode rules are used for the case change.

        Otherwise, if "use feature 'unicode_strings'" or "use locale
        ':not_characters'" is in effect:
            Unicode rules are used for the case change.

        Otherwise:
            ASCII rules are used for the case change. The lowercase of any
            character outside the ASCII range is the character itself.

uc EXPR
uc      Returns an uppercased version of EXPR. This is the internal
        function implementing the "\U" escape in double-quoted strings. It
        does not attempt to do titlecase mapping on initial letters. See
        "ucfirst" for that.

        If EXPR is omitted, uses $_.

        This function behaves the same way under various pragma, such as
        in a locale, as "lc" does.

PORTING CAVEATS

In future language versions of Raku, it will become impossible to access the $_ variable of the caller's scope, because it will not have been marked as a dynamic variable. So please consider changing:

lc;

to either:

lc($_);

or, using the subroutine as a method syntax, with the prefix . shortcut to use that scope's $_ as the invocant:

.&lc;

AUTHOR

Elizabeth Mattijsen [email protected]

Source can be located at: https://github.com/lizmat/P5lc . Comments and Pull Requests are welcome.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 Elizabeth Mattijsen

Re-imagined from Perl as part of the CPAN Butterfly Plan.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the Artistic License 2.0.