Converting Greek to Uppercase in Java

Question

What I'm trying to do is fairly simple:

String example = "Τάχιστη αλώπηξ βαφής ψημένη γη - Mary Had A Little Lamb";
String upper = example.toUpperCase();

In Greek, only the first letter of an uppercase word should contain accented characters.

// upper contains the following (incorrect) string:
// ΤΆΧΙΣΤΗ ΑΛΏΠΗΞ ΒΑΦΉΣ ΨΗΜΈΝΗ ΓΗ - MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB

// correct string:
// ΤΑΧΙΣΤΗ ΑΛΩΠΗΞ ΒΑΦΗΣ ΨΗΜΕΝΗ ΓΗ - MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB 

(The accents are hard to see, but they're there.)

According to the Java 1.7 documentation, I should be able to pass a locale to toUpperCase, like so:

String upper = example.toUpperCase(new java.util.Locale("el"));

However, it looks like there are no specific rules for toUpperCase which handle Greek correctly.

Is it possible to define the behavior of toUpperCase for a particular locale, so that I can ensure I get the correct result?

Alternatively, I can just write a utility class to handle this particular case. But if it's possible, I'd prefer to override this function per locale, in case this comes up for other languages.

Answer 1

i tried the following and seemed to work:

String example = "Τάχιστη αλώπηξ βαφής ψημένη γη - Mary Had A Little Lamb";
String upper = example.toUpperCase();
String temp = Normalizer.normalize(upper, Normalizer.Form.NFD);
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+");
System.out.println(pattern.matcher(temp).replaceAll(""));

Answer 2

Per @ajb, this is not supported in Java by default. I had to create my own solution.