Is there a C# case insensitive equals operator?

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I know that the following is case sensitive:

if (StringA == StringB) {

So is there an operator which will compare two strings in an insensitive manner?

14 Answers

Try this:

string.Equals(a, b, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase);

There are a number of properties on the StringComparer static class that return comparers for any type of case-sensitivity you might want:

StringComparer Properties

For instance, you can call

StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase.Equals(string1, string2)

or

StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase.Compare(string1, string2)

It's a bit cleaner than the string.Equals or string.Compare overloads that take a StringComparison argument.

System.Collections.CaseInsensitiveComparer

or

System.StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase
string.Equals(StringA, StringB, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase);

or

if (StringA.Equals(StringB, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)) {

but you need to be sure that StringA is not null. So probably better tu use:

string.Equals(StringA , StringB, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase);

as John suggested

EDIT: corrected the bug

You can use

if (stringA.equals(StringB, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase))

Operator? NO, but I think you can change your culture so that string comparison is not case-sensitive.

// you'll want to change this...
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture
// and you'll want to custimize this
System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CompareInfo

I'm confident that it will change the way that strings are being compared by the equals operator.

Here an idea to simplify the syntax:

public class IgnoreCase
{
    private readonly string _value;

    public IgnoreCase(string s)
    {
        _value = s;
    }

    protected bool Equals(IgnoreCase other)
    {
        return this == other;
    }

    public override bool Equals(object obj)
    {
        return obj != null &&
               (ReferenceEquals(this, obj) || (obj.GetType() == GetType() && this == (IgnoreCase) obj));
    }

    public override int GetHashCode()
    {
        return _value?.GetHashCode() ?? 0;
    }

    public static bool operator ==(IgnoreCase a, IgnoreCase b)
    {
        return string.Equals(a, b, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
    }

    public static bool operator !=(IgnoreCase a, IgnoreCase b)
    {
        return !(a == b);
    }

    public static implicit operator string(IgnoreCase s)
    {
        return s._value;
    }

    public static implicit operator IgnoreCase(string s)
    {
        return new IgnoreCase(s);
    }
}

Usable like:

Console.WriteLine((IgnoreCase) "a" == "b"); // false
Console.WriteLine((IgnoreCase) "abc" == "abC"); // true
Console.WriteLine((IgnoreCase) "Abc" == "aBc"); // true
Console.WriteLine((IgnoreCase) "ABC" == "ABC"); // true
string.Compare(string1, string2, true)
if (StringA.ToUpperInvariant() == StringB.ToUpperInvariant()) {

People report ToUpperInvariant() is faster than ToLowerInvariant().

//You can make it case insensitive by s1.ToLower() == s2.ToLower();

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