Choosing a string comparison method is simple!

home
c#
view story

2 Kicks

Choosing a string comparison method is simple!(hockblogs.net)

submitted by hockman(505) 3 years, 11 months ago

In a lot of projects different users use different string comparison methods. I’ve seen a lot of code where there is a lot of ToLowers(), Equals, equality == operators, string.compare, string.CompareTo, and so on used for comparing strings. All different usages, sometimes for different purposes, but 99% of the time for the same purpose. Since .NET 2.0 however, Microsoft has new recommendations, and I think it is really a must to read. A link to the new Microsoft recommendations can be found at the end of this article. There are two very important things to ask yourself when comparing string: * Should my string be treated as a symbolic set of bytes (an ordinal interpretation)? * Should my string vary over culture (a culture-sensitive interpretation)? If the string data, that is designed to be culture-agnostic and linguistically irrelevant, start using the StringComparison overloads, using either the StringComparison.Ordinal or StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase. These two overloads enforce a byte-by-byte comparison similar to strcmp that not only avoids bugs from linguistic interpretation of essentially symbolic strings, but provides better performance!

add a comment |category: C# |Views: 11
Tweet