22

I am not a German speaker but I am working on a software program that is used by German speaking users. So here is the question:

In a software application that displays and stores data to a DB in "upper case" only, how should 'ß' be handled?

For example in English, if a user types an address of "101 Main Street", the text box will actually display "101 MAIN STREET". How should this work in German?

Would a German speaking user expect to be able to store 'ß' if all the other letters are forced to upper case?

If a user needs to store the value "101 Goethestraße", would they expect to type "101 GOETHESTRAßE" or "101 GOETHESTRASSE"?

Should they not be able to input the letter 'ß' at all, forcing them to use 'SS' instead? Or should they be able to type 'ß' but the program would automatically replace it with 'SS'?

Improve this question
6
  • 1
    Keep in mind collation (sorting) sequence as well. If your application involves sorting in any way, learn the various rules (and some conflict depending on when they were established) and use them in your application, rather than relying upon the Latin-1/UTF8/etc. ordering. For example, ß sorts as "ss", which may involve more work if you take a "naïve" approach to sorting. The US State Department used to publish guidelines on translating software into foreign languages (and may still), but I suspect Wikipedia plus review by a person with native-level reading ability will suffice. State also of
    – Art Taylor
    Sep 19, 2011 at 19:11
  • 7
    Whoever downvoted this very clear and interesting question might want to reconsider what is asked here, i.e. what to do in case only upper case letters are accepted by a software. If that was a good idea in the first place would be another debate.
    – Takkat
    Sep 21, 2011 at 6:21
  • 1
    @Takkat: Exactly, thank you. Unfortunately that ship has sailed and I have to determine the best way to handle this case.
    – auujay
    Sep 21, 2011 at 14:08
  • 1
    @auujay: I don't envy you. In general, ß is just one incarnation of failing to pass the Turkey test. Internationalization is not easy, especially as an afterthought... Interesting question anyway.
    – OregonGhost
    Sep 22, 2011 at 20:28
  • 1
    Note that German addresses are generally given as road – number, i.e. Goethestraße 101 rather than the English way (number – road).
    – Jan
    May 27, 2016 at 12:19

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
21

DEPRECATED: there's now a capital "ß".

Since there is no capital "ß", the convention for all-caps text is to use "ss" instead. An automatic one-way* conversion to "ss" would definitely be understood and expected.

I wouldn't force them to write "ss" by not accepting "ß" in the first place though - for Germans, "ß" is a normal letter and people would get confused as to why that letter wouldn't be accepted by the system.

Also, street name and house number are reversed from English notation, i.e. the correct form to display an address in Germany would be "Goethestraße 101". The same is true for zip codes, so it's always "70469 Stuttgart", and not "Stuttgart 70469".

* one-way because you can always substitute "ß" for "ss" when going all-caps, but you cannot generally infer "ß" from an occurrence of "ss" when converting back from all-caps text.

Improve this answer
2
  • 3
    Apart from the actual ß/ss issue the question is actually about, everything mentioned here is the same for Dutch/the Netherlands. Also, why store adress info in upper case and "through away" information on storage? You probably want upper case on output, but that is a GUI/reporting/printing issue. Just let people enter the address, store it with ß and all, and do upper casing on output. Right?
    – peSHIr
    Sep 20, 2011 at 4:51
  • 3
    Note that there is now an capital ẞ german.stackexchange.com/a/8960/27716
    – hangy
    Jun 30, 2017 at 11:34
13

The appropriate capitalization of 'ß' ist 'SS' Amtliche Rechtschreibregeln 2017 §25. Therefore upper case addresses would be:

GOETHESTRASSE 101

From 2017 the use of a capital ẞ was made possible too:

GOETHESTRAẞE 101

On the keyboard it is typed with ShiftAltGrß for newer Windows releases or ShiftAltGrS in Linux. MacOSX would need a special keycode definition.

Note that the number of the building in a given street is put at the end in Germany.

Most Germans are used to type SS instead of ß when capitalizing but to avoid data inconsistencies that may come from different user habits a simple method to replace ß by SS would be a nice feature we miss here in most applications.

The ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode from 5.1 define a capitalized 'ẞ' but this only became a valid character in German orthography in 2017.

Improve this answer
5
  • 1
    How do you translate "JAN-GRASSER-WEG 7"? Nobody misses such a XXXXX feature. Capitalizing is a bad idea in the first place.
    – user unknown
    Sep 21, 2011 at 3:10
  • 2
    @user Still, if we do need capitalization for other reasons we will have to know what to do - even if we feel bad about it.
    – Takkat
    Sep 21, 2011 at 6:35
  • 1
    Most users (me included) may perhaps know there is an upper-case "ẞ" now, but will have problems entering it. I don't know where that darn thing could probably be on my keyboard.
    – tofro
    Jul 2, 2017 at 7:22
  • @tofro: see edit
    – Takkat
    Jul 2, 2017 at 10:00
  • 1
    Having an input box, which displays an upper-case ß, does not answer the question, whether the database can store it. The question is, WHY is it restricting the street name to upper case? If the database is a super old system, it might not use UTF-8 at all. Even if the character is storable in the database, many fonts may lack an upper ß.
    – user unknown
    Jul 3, 2017 at 2:36
9

In upper case, 'ß' is usually replaced with 'SS'.

How you handle 'ß' in the input is really a design question and as such up to you, but be sure to handle it somehow cause people WILL write it. If you accept Umlaute (ä,ö,ü) as input, it would be consistent to accept 'ß' too and convert it to double 'S' in your application. By the way, be aware of encoding issues!

Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    Note the opposite is not true: Not all "SS" convert to "ß" in lower case.
    – tofro
    Aug 6, 2019 at 8:58
3

An acceptable — albeit outdated — alternative to “SS” as capital-ß is “SZ”. This used to be the common form; it’s seen much rarer now but, particularly in street names, it’s still occasionally used.

Thus “GOETHESTRASZE” is a correct capitalisation of “Goethestraße”. This form has the advantage of creating less ambiguity than “SS” since there are very few German words that contain actual “sz” (whereas “ss” is common). Personally I prefer this form but I don’t advise its usage in most applications: It is uncommon and creates a distinctly old-fashioned feeling.

Alternatively you could use capital ẞ but, like “SZ”, this would be perceived as a conscious design choice and creates an old-fashioned look and feel (although it was never actually the prevalent spelling).

Whatever you do, never use “ß” as a capital letter, it looks unprofessional and would be perceived as incorrect: It’s generally associated with poorly-spelt greengrocers’ signs (e.g. “SPAß MIT SMARTIE ` S”, cf. greengrocer’s apostrophe).

Finally, Unicode databases might even handle the conversion from “ß” to “SS” in capitalisation automatically (though depressingly many libraries still don’t handle this correctly). Try it with your database software.

Improve this answer
10
  • 5
    @Takkat What do you mean, “valid”? The Duden doesn’t prescribe correct usage, it describes common usage. There are very few places where adherence to the Duden is required, but this is a thing between you and your employer.
    – Konrad Rudolph
    Sep 20, 2011 at 11:03
  • 2
    I was quoting the Duden: "Um solche Missverständnisse zu vermeiden, ließ die frühere Regelung neben SS auch SZ zu (...) gilt die Darstellung durch SZ nicht mehr, es bleibt bei SS." Duden is not a bad source for recommendations here. Sidenote: Unicode >= 5.1 can handle uppercase 'ß' (without conversion).
    – Takkat
    Sep 20, 2011 at 13:40
  • @Takkat that leaves the font designers then to come up with an acceptable glyph to match the unicode field. And that's the real challenge ;-)
    – Jan
    Sep 20, 2011 at 14:06
  • @Jan: according to the Focus article I linked to above they have tried to do so - acceptable is clearly something different ;)
    – Takkat
    Sep 20, 2011 at 14:12
  • 1
    @Takkat The magazine "Signa" has even devoted a whole issue to this topic in 2006: signographie.de/cms/signa_9.htm
    – Jan
    Sep 20, 2011 at 15:36
0

The answers to this old question deserve an update. Since June 2017 a capital ß (ẞ) is part of the official german orthography. A matching Unicode letter already exists since 2008 (U+1E9E). As ẞ never is the first character of a word, the capital letter is indended to be used in capitalized text, such as names on documents or street names.

see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fes_%C3%9F

Improve this answer
1
  • It's a funny thing to plan CAPITALIZED to be used in documents. People, handling documents, are sometimes very picky and are often not the brightest ones. I heard from aircraft travellers, which where rejected, because the documents wrote them Jan-Philip, while the passport said Jan Philip. :)
    – user unknown
    Aug 6, 2019 at 15:55

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.