Question

I’m wondering what the correct way to compare two characters ignoring case that will work for all cultures. Also, is Comparer<char>.Default the best way to test two characters without ignoring case? Does this work for surrogate-pairs?

EDIT: Added sample IComparer<char> implementation

If this helps anyone this is what I’ve decided to use

public class CaseInsensitiveCharComparer : IComparer<char> {
    private readonly System.Globalization.CultureInfo ci;
    public CaseInsensitiveCharComparer(System.Globalization.CultureInfo ci) {
        this.ci = ci;
    }
    public CaseInsensitiveCharComparer()
        : this(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CurrentCulture) { }
    public int Compare(char x, char y) {
        return Char.ToUpper(x, ci) - Char.ToUpper(y, ci);
    }
}

// Prints 3
Console.WriteLine("This is a test".CountChars('t', new CaseInsensitiveCharComparer()));

Answer 1

It depends on what you mean by “work for all cultures”. Would you want “i” and “I” to be equal even in Turkey?

You could use:

bool equal = char.ToUpperInvariant(x) == char.ToUpperInvariant(y);

… but I’m not sure whether that “works” according to all cultures by your understanding of “works”.

Of course you could convert both characters to strings and then perform whatever comparison you want on the strings. Somewhat less efficient, but it does give you all the range of comparisons available in the framework:

bool equal = x.ToString().Equals(y.ToString(), 
                                 StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase);

For surrogate pairs, a Comparer<char> isn’t going to be feasible anyway, because you don’t have a single char. You could create a Comparer<int> though.