This looks like a weird situation. The ß is kind of funky "s" and there is no uppercase version of this single lowercase letter. It is normally translated to 2 upper case "S" symbols. straße => STRASSE. This creates a pronunciation exception in German. The "a" preceding the "s" is pronounced differently depending upon whether one or two consonants follow it. This is a weird thing, but the string gets longer when capitalized. I am not sure what uc() does. Anyway was thinking that this has something to do with more memory being allocated and perhaps lost.