tip: mnemonic to remember Unicode order of Uppercase, LowerCase, Numbers: 7Up

[Anil Philip]

I devised this mnemonic to help remember Unicode order of Uppercase, LowerCase, Numbers.
The fizzy drink: 7Up
(7) Numbers, (U)ppercase, (p) LowerCase.
Sharing in case it helps others.

[Paul Clapham]

A good mnemonic for sure, but it isn't clear to me why you'd need to remember that.

[Anil Philip]

Paul Clapham wrote:A good mnemonic for sure, but it isn't clear to me why you'd need to remember that.

Have you not done the test questions from the appendix in the book? A few of them test that order.

[Paul Clapham]

Anil Philip wrote:Have you not done the test questions from the appendix in the book? A few of them test that order.

Hell no. That just confirms my bad opinion of those questions.

[Stephan van Hulst]

I just KNOW that I had to consult an ASCII table for just this thing not too long ago, even if I can't remember what it was for. I've also had to do this a handful of times over the years.

Love the mnemonic, I might even use it.

[Tim Holloway]

Just remember that in Java, you don't use ASCII, you use Unicode. Fortunately, ASCII maps onto Unicode. Also, most OS's these days are using UTF, which is a special form of Unicode. Just for the record, I don't know if the extra characters in ASCIIZ map or not. Never really got into them.

Finally, just to round out the pedantry, if you run across IBM mainframe legacy files, the EBCDIC codes run "7Pu". And have holes between character sequences. Credit that to its various inheritances from 6-bit BCDID and 12-row card punch devices.

[Paul Anilprem]

Anil Philip wrote:
The fizzy drink: 7Up

I remember this Indian drink from long ago. Havent heard of it recently. Is it still available?

Well, at least the Java cert exams do not expect you to know the order of ascii chars or even their integral values.

Knowing that char is an integral type and its consequences is required though.

[Tim Holloway]

Paul Anilprem wrote:I remember this Indian drink from long ago. Havent heard of it recently. Is it still available?

Do you mean there was a specifically Indian drink named 7Up?

Because the 7Up sold in USA and much of the rest of the world is alive, well, and quite popular. Have several in my refrigerator, in fact. It's presently owned by Keurig/Dr. Pepper and distributed internationally by Pepsico.

Like many soft drinks, it was originally marketed as a patent medicine and indeed, it is widely used as a counter to nausea. In fact, I looked at a bottle of anti-nausea medicine at my local drugstore and the ingredients were virtually identical. It's basically lemon and lime juice in a syrup base with carbonation.

Similar products have included Upper10 (from RC Cola) and Sprite (Coca-Cola's equivalent).

[Paul Anilprem]

Tim Holloway wrote:Do you mean there was a specifically Indian drink named 7Up?

Yes, I think it was called Leher 7Up. May be it was one of the several brands owned by Pepsi or Coca Cola, imns.

I stopped drinking colas long ago, so that could also be a reason why I haven't noticed its presence (if it still exists)  

[Anil Philip]

Paul Anilprem wrote:

Anil Philip wrote:
The fizzy drink: 7Up

Well, at least the Java cert exams do not expect you to know the order of ascii chars or even their integral values.

Sorry, I disagree. You need to know this information, for instance, while sorting.

Several of the questions in the Sybex 829 book - like this one:

tb864585.JaSE17SG.c09.08

What is the result of the following program?

3:  public class MyComparator implements Comparator˂String˃ {
4:     public int compare(String a, String b) {
5:        return b.toLowerCase().compareTo(a.toLowerCase());
6:     }
7:     public static void main(String[] args) {
8:        String[] values = { "123", "Abb", "aab" };
9:        Arrays.sort(values, new MyComparator());
10:       for (var s: values)
11:          System.out.print(s + " ");
12:    }
13: }

[Tim Holloway]

Although, again, just to be pedantic, Java Strings are not ASCII, they're Unicode!

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Fun way to remember it!