Question

I have some tests that check strings that are displayed to the user.

I don’t wish the test to fail to due to changes in the indentations or line breaks etc. So I am looking for something like a string compare that.

• Ignore while space as the start of the string (easy use string.trim)
• When any number of any type of white space that is next to each other matches in the same way as if it was a single space.

I could start to create a regex, but someone else may have a better solution hence this question.

Answer 1

Writing a custom compare would be tricky if you need it just to do this for whitespace.
I would suggest using regex to normalize, i.e.

private static readonly Regex normalizeSpace =
        new Regex(@"\s+", RegexOptions.Compiled);
...
string s = normalizeSpace.Replace(input, " ");

Obviously normalize both operands and then test for equality as normal.