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

Answer 1

An easy way to compare strings that are only different by lowercase and capitalized characters is to do an ascii comparison. All capital and lowercase letters differ by 32 bits in the ascii table, using this information we have the following...

    for( int i = 0; i < string2.length(); i++)
    {
       if (string1[i] == string2[i] || int(string1[i]) == int(string2[j])+32 ||int(string1[i]) == int(string2[i])-32) 
    {
      count++;
      continue;
    }
    else 
    {
      break;
    }
    if(count == string2.length())
    {
      //then we have a match
    }
}

Answer 2

Just a note on whatever method you finally choose, if that method happens to include the use of strcmp that some answers suggest:

strcmp doesn't work with Unicode data in general. In general, it doesn't even work with byte-based Unicode encodings, such as utf-8, since strcmp only makes byte-per-byte comparisons and Unicode code points encoded in utf-8 can take more than 1 byte. The only specific Unicode case strcmp properly handle is when a string encoded with a byte-based encoding contains only code points below U+00FF - then the byte-per-byte comparison is enough.

Answer 3

See std::lexicographical_compare:

// lexicographical_compare example
#include <iostream>  // std::cout, std::boolalpha
#include <algorithm>  // std::lexicographical_compare
#include <cctype>  // std::tolower

// a case-insensitive comparison function:
bool mycomp (char c1, char c2) {
    return std::tolower(c1) < std::tolower(c2);
}

int main () {
    char foo[] = "Apple";
    char bar[] = "apartment";

    std::cout << std::boolalpha;

    std::cout << "Comparing foo and bar lexicographically (foo < bar):\n";

    std::cout << "Using default comparison (operator<): ";
    std::cout << std::lexicographical_compare(foo, foo + 5, bar, bar + 9);
    std::cout << '\n';

    std::cout << "Using mycomp as comparison object: ";
    std::cout << std::lexicographical_compare(foo, foo + 5, bar, bar + 9, mycomp);
    std::cout << '\n';

    return 0;
}

Demo

Answer 4

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
}

Answer 5

The Boost.String library has a lot of algorithms for doing case-insenstive comparisons and so on.

You could implement your own, but why bother when it's already been done?

Answer 6

I've had good experience using the International Components for Unicode libraries - they're extremely powerful, and provide methods for conversion, locale support, date and time rendering, case mapping (which you don't seem to want), and collation, which includes case- and accent-insensitive comparison (and more). I've only used the C++ version of the libraries, but they appear to have a Java version as well.

Methods exist to perform normalized compares as referred to by @Coincoin, and can even account for locale - for example (and this a sorting example, not strictly equality), traditionally in Spanish (in Spain), the letter combination "ll" sorts between "l" and "m", so "lz" < "ll" < "ma".