Talk:Case sensitivity

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usernames

Since when are user names case sensitive? In most systems I know user names are not case sensitive to avoid many problems, like users forgetting the case. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Danobrega (talk • contribs) 08:54, 8 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Search for either of the two terms with uppercase OR. For example, cats OR dogs. 212.56.161.0 (talk) 23:58, 16 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

November

For information/discussion on case sensitivity, check out wikimedia (the backbone of wikipedia): http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Case_sensitivity. rs2 22:30, 19 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

This is wrong: "...in German there is no uppercase form for the sharp s ("ß")." The uppercase form for the sharp s is "SS". Can't find the edit button for the upper part of the article, so i can't correct it myself.

I see Wikipedia itself neglects to volunteer to smash case, for instance the articles Case sensitivity and Case Sensitivity are NOT NOT NOT the same article.

Is there an example in Wikipedia where this neglect to smash case actually helps people, apart from the significant example of perhaps measurably reducing the work of the servers that host Wikipedia?

Brion you might think I'm some kind of anti-american nazi :-)

Why so? Case-sensitivity is probably common to all languages that use the tiny fraction of writing systems which exhibit case. --Brion

I have noticed, that the Page Titles are case sensitive (except the first letter). But didn't find any explanation about that. While it might be completely offtopic here, does that make sense? Is there any discussion or explanation about that topic, and I only didn't find it?

Thanks, User:NilsB

hyphen-sensitive

I would think "case sensitivity" is correct, but as an adjective or adverb, wouldn't it be "case-sensitive" and "case-sensitively" etc.? — FREAK OF NUR_xTURE (TALK) 04:59, 2 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. When two words are used as a single adjective, a hyphen is necessary. dachshund2k3 (talk) 02:04, 30 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Case sensitive web search engines?

This may be not be the correct place to ask for this, but I needed to do a case sensitive web search and came up with.. nothing.

As good as Google otherwise is, it lacks this feature. Alta Vista supposedly had this, but doesn't anymore. Any suggestions? Anything on this on Wikipedia? Having just looked at this article tonight (i.e. December 8 2009), I was extremely surprised to see that this article did not mention Google as a search engine which, as far as I know, is NOT case-sensitive, so that you will get equivalent number of hits on Google if type in a term in capitals or lower-case. This has long been my understanding on Google - am I right? ACEOREVIVED (talk) 22:14, 8 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See CaseSensitiveSearch.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.236.232.133 (talk) 02:55, 10 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Vandalism

Can anyone hazard a guess at why this article has been the target of so much vandalism over the last day or 2? -- Smjg (talk) 22:17, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's linked in MediaWiki:Noarticletext, MediaWiki:Noexactmatch (through the redirect case sensitive), and MediaWiki:Noexactmatch-nocreate (through case sensitive) which was created on 25, October 2008. So the visibility of this system message may explain the important rise in traffic of case sensitive, [1], whilst the traffic of case sensitivity alone relatively diminished. This explains the cumulated traffic and so the level of vandalism here. Cenarium ^Talk 01:39, 1 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Web site addresses are case sensitive??

Under the list of examples of case sensitive data, I am confused as why web site addresses are listed. Domain names are not case sensitive, but I believe depending on the web hosting software, the page name may be. example.com is the same as EXAMPLE.COM, but example.com/index.html may not necessarily be the same as example.com/INDEX.HTML

I think web site url's should be removed here as it could lead to confusion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Goodmorning2255 (talk • contribs) 03:48, 13 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

As a general rule, URLs are case sensitive, on a number of counts:

Many web servers are Unix-based, so that the file system is case sensitive.
Any query string is part of the URL, and generally speaking is case sensitive.
Even on case-insensitive file systems, server-side or client-side scripting may make use of the capitalisation by which a page is accessed.
Even excluding any query string, URLs may not correspond to actual file names, and so the server may treat them as case-sensitive or not independently of whether its file system is case sensitive.
Even if for a given website none of these is the case, user agents don't know this, and thus must treat page.html, Page.Html and page.HTML as distinct.

In any case, the way to deal with a statement being confusing isn't to remove it (except possibly as a temporary measure), but to work out how to write it to avoid confusion. -- Smjg (talk) 13:36, 3 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

QBASIC said to be case-sensitive - definitely wrong!

Or I cannot understand what "case sensitive is"

In QBASIC IDE, you can type

X=10
print x

And then you press Enter on last line, all instances of X converted to last used casing (x). (and running it prints 10)

If you create such a program outside IDE, it converts on load.

(As example of case sensitive Basics I can cite Liberty Basic / Just Basic. In them, above program stays "as is" and then run, prints 0 (because x is undefined) ) 212.92.128.7 (talk) 06:24, 22 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Case sensitivity in speech

In one Star Trek: Voyager novels, one of the characters meets a female Q and asks her if she is Q. "No, I'm q", she replies, "can't you hear the lower case?" How are you supposed to hear the lower case? JIP | Talk 22:01, 9 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

She's a Q, of course she can hear the lower case. Guy Harris (talk) 23:41, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Edit request on 9 November 2012

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Change the section title: With computer systems of gov of india into: Use in computer systems Reason: Obviously India has nothing to do with this topic, there is no mention of India anywhere else other than in this title. Abuyakl (talk) 19:21, 9 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Reverted older vandalism that was not previously caught. Thank you for helping to improve Wikipedia. —KuyaBriBri^Talk 20:05, 9 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Windows - NTFS

"Current Windows file systems, like NTFS, are case-sensitive; that is a readme.txt and a Readme.txt can exist in the same directory. Windows disallows the user to create a second file differing only in case due to compatibility issues with older software not designed for such operation." Not just older software. One would struggle to find any newer software that is compatible with it either. 77.73.168.99 (talk) 16:28, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

filenames

In computers, some examples of usually case-sensitive data are

[...]
*filenames
[...]

Imho this is wrong: most computers use Windows and although it is possible, to use upper- and lower-case filenames in Windows with NTFS or VFAT, the file names are not case sensitive: it is impossible to create two files in the same folder, when the only difference in the filename is the case of a letter and all the file system operations are also case insensitive. --MrBurns (talk) 00:03, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The article no longer makes that broad claim. Guy Harris (talk) 23:39, 3 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

When is it used?

When is either one of these approaches used? Many articles list use cases of the ways how they are stored. But what is the actual philosophy behind case sensitivity vs. insensitivity? Usually my mind is blank when I try to find something from the command line in Unix: I don't remember the file names I try to search (a big NAS for example). That's why I use case insensitive searches. Most of the commands and defaults are usually case sensitive in Unix, however. I just wonder why that is the case (no pun). Then I know a programmer often needs case sensitive searches (definitions in upper case in SQL, C, Java etc.).

Storing vs. searching, computer vs. human, content vs. filenames, different applications and use cases. Why Unix favors case sensitivity while "popular" systems favor insensitivity? Still not completely clear to me and "case sensitivity for exact matches" is a tautology as that may not always be the case either: sometimes things are stored as containers (not files) and user selects its name (it can be the same, i.e. Google Drive style). The more user side a system tends to be the more case insensitivity there usually is. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Beoldhin (talk • contribs) 10:18, 16 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation?

It seems to me that "case sensitivity" is used to mean two things:

The quality of being case sensitive - "This system has case sensitivity".
The domain of possible ways to handle case - "What is the case sensitivity of this system.

Most of the article is about the second meaning - but the lead defines only the first. I will change it to define "case sensitivity" in the second meaning, alongside "case sensitive" and "case insensitive". NisJørgensen (talk) 22:13, 2 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Friendly Fire

@Guy Harris: The issue is explained at WP:INTDABLINK and WP:HOWTODAB. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:49, 3 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Guy Harris: I understand the educational purpose. However, as explained in the two links provided above by John of Reading, the fact remains that direct links to DAB pages are errors. Any experienced DABfixer who comes across this link to Friendly Fire at any time in the future, whether through Disambiguation pages with links (DPWL) (it was #1314 out of 4782 when I just looked) or otherwise, will fix it in exactly the same way I did yesterday (which you reverted).

How about this text or something like it? It would have the same descriptive value, and with any luck might stop an editor or two from adding links which need fixing.

On the [[English Wikipedia]] for example a search for "Friendly fire" returns the military article "[[Friendly fire]]" but a search for "Friendly Fire" (capitalized "Fire") returns the disambiguation page "[[Friendly Fire (disambiguation)|Friendly Fire]]" (which by the guidelines [[WP:INTDABLINK]] and [[WP:HOWTODAB]] must be linked through the (disambiguation) qualifier to avoid being an error).

User:DPL bot records all direct links to DAB pages as errors (in article space only; it ignores links like the one in my first paragraph and the one to residual in WP:DPL). I cycle repeatedly through DPWL, which currently takes me about four months. Today, I fixed 9 intentional links to DAB pages by linking through the (disambiguation) qualifier; yesterday, 14 (not including this one); the day before, 13. Those numbers are typical. I've reverted and repaired edits by 10-year veterans and by WP:ADMINs who've introduced errors because they didn't know those two guidelines. (I've also come across several dozen edits where users have responded to a DPL bot nastygram by linking through the (disambiguation) qualifier rather than go to the effort of searching out the correct link, but that's another, and expletive-deleted, story. Such bad links are only ever found and fixed by accident.) Narky Blert (talk) 18:54, 18 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"Case-insensitiv" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Case-insensitiv has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 September 21 § Case-insensitiv until a consensus is reached. 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 01:59, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]