History
Early toolsmiths writing in C under Unix began developing idioms at a rapid rate to classify characters into different types. For example, in the ASCII character set, the following test identifies a letter:
if ('A' <= c && c <= 'Z' || 'a' <= c && c <= 'z')However, this idiom does not necessarily work for other character sets such as EBCDIC.
Pretty soon, programs became thick with tests such as the one above, or worse, tests almost like the one above. A programmer can write the same idiom several different ways, which slows comprehension and increases the chance for errors.
Before long, the idioms were replaced by the functions in
Read more about this topic: C Character Classification
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