How do I do a case-insensitive string comparison?

Question

How can I do case insensitive string comparison in Python?

I would like to encapsulate comparison of a regular strings to a repository string using in a very simple

Answer 1

Section 3.13 of the Unicode standard defines algorithms for caseless matching.

X.casefold() == Y.casefold() in Python 3 implements the "default caseless matching" (D144).

Casefolding does not preserve the normalization of strings in all instances and therefore the normalization needs to be done ('å' vs. 'å'). D145 introduces "canonical caseless matching":

import unicodedata

def NFD(text):
    return unicodedata.normalize('NFD', text)

def canonical_caseless(text):
    return NFD(NFD(text).casefold())

NFD() is called twice for very infrequent edge cases involving U+0345 character.

Example:

>>> 'å'.casefold() == 'å'.casefold()
False
>>> canonical_caseless('å') == canonical_caseless('å')
True

There are also compatibility caseless matching (D146) for cases such as '㎒' (U+3392) and "identifier caseless matching" to simplify and optimize caseless matching of identifiers.