Is there a way to compare 2 Strings without it being case-sensitive?

Question

I've just spent almost hour debugging a List in my code which was being sorted wrong by my Comparator.

Turns out that string.compareTo(string2) is case-sensitive. Meaning that all Capital letters come before the lowercase letters. e.g. "Z" comes before "d".

Is there any better way of comparing 2 Strings inside a Comparatorand sorting them alphabetically ascending without them being case sensitive other then string.toLowerCase().compareTo(string2.toLowerCase()); ?

Edit: There's a possibility of any accented letter appearing in my String like for example: ä, ö, ü, é, è, etc.

user_466862 · Answer

You have two options provided in String itself:

String.compareToIgnoreCase(String): case insensitive variant of compareTo)
String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER: Comparator that has the same ordering as compareToIgnoreCase
or, for more advanced options like locale-specific rules, java.text.Collator and java.text.RuleBasedCollator

As a tip: your first stop should be the Javadoc, not post a question on Stack Overflow: the Javadoc is extensive and will usually provide a quick answer.

user_3656904 · Answer

Use String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER.compare

user_5019199 · Answer

use compareToIgnoreCase() method

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#compareToIgnoreCase-java.lang.String-

user_10329913 · Answer

compareToIgnoreCase

The String Api has a second compare to function that does a compare while ignoring case.

string1.compareToIgnoreCase(string2);

Is there a way to compare 2 Strings without it being case-sensitive?

4 Answers

compareToIgnoreCase