How to Do Case Insensitive String Comparison

How to do case insensitive string comparison?

The simplest way to do it (if you're not worried about special Unicode characters) is to call toUpperCase:

var areEqual = string1.toUpperCase() === string2.toUpperCase();

Case-insensitive string comparison in C++

Boost includes a handy algorithm for this:

#include <boost/algorithm/string.hpp>
// Or, for fewer header dependencies:
//#include <boost/algorithm/string/predicate.hpp>

std::string str1 = "hello, world!";
std::string str2 = "HELLO, WORLD!";

if (boost::iequals(str1, str2))
{
    // Strings are identical
}

How do I do a case-insensitive string comparison?

Assuming ASCII strings:

string1 = 'Hello'
string2 = 'hello'

if string1.lower() == string2.lower():
    print("The strings are the same (case insensitive)")
else:
    print("The strings are NOT the same (case insensitive)")

As of Python 3.3, casefold() is a better alternative:

string1 = 'Hello'
string2 = 'hello'

if string1.casefold() == string2.casefold():
    print("The strings are the same (case insensitive)")
else:
    print("The strings are NOT the same (case insensitive)")

If you want a more comprehensive solution that handles more complex unicode comparisons, see other answers.

How to do a case-insensitive string comparison?

If you can afford deviating a little from strict C standard, you can make use of strcasecmp().
It is a POSIX API.

Otherwise, you always have the option to convert the strings to a certain case (UPPER or lower) and then perform the normal comparison using strcmp().

Case insensitive standard string comparison in C++

You can create a predicate function and use it in std::equals to perform the comparison:

bool icompare_pred(unsigned char a, unsigned char b)
{
    return std::tolower(a) == std::tolower(b);
}

bool icompare(std::string const& a, std::string const& b)
{
    if (a.length()==b.length()) {
        return std::equal(b.begin(), b.end(),
                           a.begin(), icompare_pred);
    }
    else {
        return false;
    }
}

Now you can simply do:

if (icompare(str1, str)) {
    std::cout << "Compares" << std::endl;
}

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