Question

I use Google App Engine and cannot use any C/C++ extension, just pure & pythonic library to do conversion of Unicode/UTF-8 strings to lower/upper case. str.lower() and string.lowercase() don’t.

Answer 1

str encoded in UTF-8 and unicode are two different types. Don’t use string, use the appropriate method on the unicode object:

>>> print u'ĉ'.upper()
Ĉ

Decode str to unicode before using:

>>> print 'ĉ'.decode('utf-8').upper()
Ĉ