Case insensitive access for generic dictionary

Question

I have an application that use managed dlls. One of those dlls return a generic dictionary:

Dictionary MyDictionary;  

Answer 1

Its not very elegant but in case you cant change the creation of dictionary, and all you need is a dirty hack, how about this:

var item = MyDictionary.Where(x => x.Key.ToLower() == MyIndex.ToLower()).FirstOrDefault();
    if (item != null)
    {
        TheValue = item.Value;
    }

Answer 2

There's no way to specify a StringComparer at the point where you try to get a value. If you think about it, "foo".GetHashCode() and "FOO".GetHashCode() are totally different so there's no reasonable way you could implement a case-insensitive get on a case-sensitive hash map.

You can, however, create a case-insensitive dictionary in the first place using:-

var comparer = StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase;
var caseInsensitiveDictionary = new Dictionary<string, int>(comparer);

Or create a new case-insensitive dictionary with the contents of an existing case-sensitive dictionary (if you're sure there are no case collisions):-

var oldDictionary = ...;
var comparer = StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase;
var newDictionary = new Dictionary<string, int>(oldDictionary, comparer);

This new dictionary then uses the GetHashCode() implementation on StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase so comparer.GetHashCode("foo") and comparer.GetHashcode("FOO") give you the same value.

Alternately, if there are only a few elements in the dictionary, and/or you only need to lookup once or twice, you can treat the original dictionary as an IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue>> and just iterate over it:-

var myKey = ...;
var myDictionary = ...;
var comparer = StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase;
var value = myDictionary.FirstOrDefault(x => String.Equals(x.Key, myKey, comparer)).Value;

Or if you prefer, without the LINQ:-

var myKey = ...;
var myDictionary = ...;
var comparer = StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase;
int? value;
foreach (var element in myDictionary)
{
  if (String.Equals(element.Key, myKey, comparer))
  {
    value = element.Value;
    break;
  }
}

This saves you the cost of creating a new data structure, but in return the cost of a lookup is O(n) instead of O(1).

Answer 3

There is much simpler way:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
....
var caseInsensitiveDictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase);

Answer 4

For you LINQers out there who never use a regular dictionary constructor:

myCollection.ToDictionary(x => x.PartNumber, x => x.PartDescription, StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase)