Question

This is a weird requirement I have. I know even my question is quite confusing. Here is what I want to know.

I’ve two string variables. I need to do equality comparison of the datatype of the underlying value in the string variables. For ex.

string firstVariable = "123"; // It contains integer value. i.e. I can convert it to integer value
string secondVariable = "string" // It contains string value.

Now I need to compare whether datatype of the underlying values of these two strings are same. How can I do this?

Update: Thanks to all for the clarifications and answers. How about if I know the type of one variable?
For ex:

int firstVariable;
string secondVariable = "123". 

Is this possible to check whether the type of the first variable equals to converted value of the secondVariable. When I declared firstVariable as int it doesn’t mean it is always int type. What I mean here is, I know the type of one variable and other variable is string and I want compare equality of the datatypes of firstvariable and value datatype of the secondVariable.

Is Convert.ChangeType will anyway help in the above scenario?

I know this is silly question, but out of curiosity in the language feature exploring, I wanted to know this.

Answer 1

Written from my head so there may (will) be errors:

class StringTypeEqualityComparer : IEqualityComparer<string, string>
{
    public bool Equals(string x, string y)
    {
        int tempInt;
        if (Int32.TryParse(x, out tempInt) && (Int32.TryParse(y, out tempInt))
            return true;

        bool tempBool;
        if (Boolean.TryParse(x, out tempBool) && Boolean.TryParse(y, out tempBool))
            return true;

        float tempFloat;
        if (Single.TryParse(x, out tempFloat) && Single.TryParse(y, out tempFloat))
            return true;

        // And whatever other types you want to compare...

        return false;

        // But what if two regular strings should also evaluate to equal?
    }
}