Python3 .title() of utf-8 strings

Question

So I have a string:

amélie

In bytes it is b'ame\xcc\x81lie'

In utf-8 the character is combining acute accent for the previous character http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0301/index.htm

u'ame\u0301lie'

When I do: 'amélie'.title() on that string, I get 'AméLie', which makes no sense to me.

I know I can do a workaround, but is this intended behavior or a bug? I would expect the "l" to NOT get capitalized.

another experiment:

  In [1]: [ord(c) for c in 'amélie'.title()]
  Out[1]: [65, 109, 101, 769, 76, 105, 101]

  In [2]: [ord(c) for c in 'amélie']
  Out[2]: [97, 109, 101, 769, 108, 105, 101]

Answer 1

Take a look at these questions: Python title() with apostrophes and Titlecasing a string with exceptions

Basically it looks like a limitation of the inbuilt title function which seems to be very liberal about what it considers a word boundary.

You can use string.capwords:

import string
string.capwords('amélie')
Out[18]: 'Amélie'

Another thing you could do is use the character é ('\xc3\xa9') which is an e with accent built in:

b'am\xc3\xa9lie'.decode().title()
Out[21]: 'Amélie'