How to check if a String contains another String in a case insensitive manner in Java?

Kamikaze_Mercenary_2628 0
Viewed 486810

Say I have two strings,

String s1 = "AbBaCca";
String s2 = "bac";

I want to perform a check returning that s2 is contained within s1. I can do this with:

return s1.contains(s2);

I am pretty sure that contains() is case sensitive, however I can't determine this for sure from reading the documentation. If it is then I suppose my best method would be something like:

return s1.toLowerCase().contains(s2.toLowerCase());

All this aside, is there another (possibly better) way to accomplish this without caring about case-sensitivity?

java string
19 Answers

Yes, contains is case sensitive. You can use java.util.regex.Pattern with the CASE_INSENSITIVE flag for case insensitive matching:

Pattern.compile(Pattern.quote(wantedStr), Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE).matcher(source).find();

EDIT: If s2 contains regex special characters (of which there are many) it's important to quote it first. I've corrected my answer since it is the first one people will see, but vote up Matt Quail's since he pointed this out.

Dave_L_30930

One problem with the answer by Dave L. is when s2 contains regex markup such as \d, etc.

You want to call Pattern.quote() on s2:

Pattern.compile(Pattern.quote(s2), Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE).matcher(s1).find();
Matt_Quail_157900

You can use 

org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils.containsIgnoreCase("AbBaCca", "bac");

The Apache Commons library is very useful for this sort of thing. And this particular one may be better than regular expressions as regex is always expensive in terms of performance.

user_9019820

There is a simple concise way, using regex flag (case insensitive {i}):

 String s1 = "hello abc efg";
 String s2 = "ABC";
 s1.matches(".*(?i)"+s2+".*");

/*
 * .*  denotes every character except line break
 * (?i) denotes case insensitivity flag enabled for s2 (String)
 * */
user_35930840

I'm not sure what your main question is here, but yes, .contains is case sensitive.

SCdF_16660

We can use stream with anyMatch and contains of Java 8

public class Test2 {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        String a = "Gina Gini Protijayi Soudipta";
        String b = "Gini";

        System.out.println(WordPresentOrNot(a, b));
    }// main

    private static boolean WordPresentOrNot(String a, String b) {
    //contains is case sensitive. That's why change it to upper or lower case. Then check
        // Here we are using stream with anyMatch
        boolean match = Arrays.stream(a.toLowerCase().split(" ")).anyMatch(b.toLowerCase()::contains);
        return match;
    }

}
user_60379560

or you can use a simple approach and just convert the string's case to substring's case and then use contains method.

user_117540640
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