Case-insensitive string comparison in C++ [closed]

Answer 1

If you don't want to use Boost library then here is solution to it using only C++ standard io header.

#include <iostream>

struct iequal
{
    bool operator()(int c1, int c2) const
    {
        // case insensitive comparison of two characters.
        return std::toupper(c1) == std::toupper(c2);
    }
};

bool iequals(const std::string& str1, const std::string& str2)
{
    // use std::equal() to compare range of characters using the functor above.
    return std::equal(str1.begin(), str1.end(), str2.begin(), iequal());
}

int main(void)
{
    std::string str_1 = "HELLO";
    std::string str_2 = "hello";

    if(iequals(str_1,str_2))
    {
        std::cout<<"String are equal"<<std::endl;   
    }

    else
    {
        std::cout<<"String are not equal"<<std::endl;
    }


    return 0;
}

Answer 2

bool insensitive_c_compare(char A, char B){
  static char mid_c = ('Z' + 'a') / 2 + 'Z';
  static char up2lo = 'A' - 'a'; /// the offset between upper and lowers

  if ('a' >= A and A >= 'z' or 'A' >= A and 'Z' >= A)
      if ('a' >= B and B >= 'z' or 'A' >= B and 'Z' >= B)
      /// check that the character is infact a letter
      /// (trying to turn a 3 into an E would not be pretty!)
      {
        if (A > mid_c and B > mid_c or A < mid_c and B < mid_c)
        {
          return A == B;
        }
        else
        {
          if (A > mid_c)
            A = A - 'a' + 'A'; 
          if (B > mid_c)/// convert all uppercase letters to a lowercase ones
            B = B - 'a' + 'A';
          /// this could be changed to B = B + up2lo;
          return A == B;
        }
      }
}

this could probably be made much more efficient, but here is a bulky version with all its bits bare.

not all that portable, but works well with whatever is on my computer (no idea, I am of pictures not words)

Answer 3

Are you talking about a dumb case insensitive compare or a full normalized Unicode compare?

A dumb compare will not find strings that might be the same but are not binary equal.

Example:

U212B (ANGSTROM SIGN)
U0041 (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A) + U030A (COMBINING RING ABOVE)
U00C5 (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE).

Are all equivalent but they also have different binary representations.

That said, Unicode Normalization should be a mandatory read especially if you plan on supporting Hangul, Thaï and other asian languages.

Also, IBM pretty much patented most optimized Unicode algorithms and made them publicly available. They also maintain an implementation : IBM ICU

Answer 4

My first thought for a non-unicode version was to do something like this:

bool caseInsensitiveStringCompare(const string& str1, const string& str2) {
    if (str1.size() != str2.size()) {
        return false;
    }
    for (string::const_iterator c1 = str1.begin(), c2 = str2.begin(); c1 != str1.end(); ++c1, ++c2) {
        if (tolower(static_cast<unsigned char>(*c1)) != tolower(static_cast<unsigned char>(*c2))) {
            return false;
        }
    }
    return true;
}

Answer 5

FYI, strcmp() and stricmp() are vulnerable to buffer overflow, since they just process until they hit a null terminator. It's safer to use _strncmp() and _strnicmp().

Answer 6

You can use strcasecmp on Unix, or stricmp on Windows.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned so far is that if you are using stl strings with these methods, it's useful to first compare the length of the two strings, since this information is already available to you in the string class. This could prevent doing the costly string comparison if the two strings you are comparing aren't even the same length in the first place.