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I said use a Unicode library if input data is actual human language. Which names and addresses are.

99% case being ASCII data generated by other software of unknown provenance. (Or sometimes by humans, but it's still data for machines, not for humans.)



I am really not sure about this 99%. A lot of programs deal with quite a lot of user-provided data, which you don’t control.


User-provided data, yes, but also data where you can treat non-ASCII bytes as garbage in -> garbage out. E.g. the config file might be typed by a human but if you need to support case-insensitive keys you still don't need to worry about Unicode.


Exactly. But in this case, don’t try to upper-case or otherwise transform anything.




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