EU.net and eu.net database entries

Marten,

>Sorry Piet, old, old, old software ... The new software will take care of
>this, but I think the new software will change everything to lowercase. I
>have not written this part yet, have to put some thought in it though.
>
>Anyone in the database working group has any feeling how these should be
>dealt with ? From a programming point of view, handling everything lowercase
>is much easier, I do not really want to check every single combination of
>lower/uppercase before I update something ... Then again, after some thinking
>(I usually type faster than I think ;-) the indexing is done in lowercase,
>and key lookups are always normalized to lowercase before a lookup.
>
>So the real question is, should entries in the database be left untouched
>when it comes to upper/lowercase, or should all be normalized ?

I'd prefer the following behaviour:

- In the external representation keep it exactly as it was submitted, with
  mixed case intact.

- Internally, whenever you use this string for an index, compare or lookup,
  consistently convert it to lowercase, thus prohibiting duplicates with
  different case. I think this would even be in line with the current
  behaviour of other programs...

I don't have any idea what this would mean to the implementer
programming-wise...

Wilfried.