Python string.title() issue with German umlauts

Question

I got a strange behavior of the Python string.title() function if the string contains German umlauts (üöä). Then, not only the first character of the string is capitalized, but as well the character following the umlaut.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
a = "müller"
print a.title()
# this returns >MüLler< , not >Müller< as expected

Tried to fix by setting locale to German UTF-8 charset, but no success:

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE.UTF-8')
a="müller"
print a.title()
# same value >MüLler<

Any ideas to prevent the capitalization after the umlaut?
My Python version is 2.6.6 on debian linux

Answer 1

Decode your string to Unicode, then use unicode.title():

>>> a = "müller"
>>> a.decode('utf8').title()
u'M\xfcller'
>>> print a.decode('utf8').title()
Müller

You can always encode to UTF-8 again later on.