Using InvariantCultureIgnoreCase instead of ToUpper for case-insensitive string comparisons

Robert Harvey picture Robert Harvey · Feb 13, 2010 · Viewed 11.6k times · Source

On this page, a commenter writes:

Do NOT ever use .ToUpper to insure comparing strings is case-insensitive.

Instead of this:

type.Name.ToUpper() == (controllerName.ToUpper() + "Controller".ToUpper())) 

Do this:

type.Name.Equals(controllerName + "Controller", 
     StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)

Why is this way preferred?

Answer

Gabriele Petrioli picture Gabriele Petrioli · Feb 13, 2010

Here is the answer in details .. The Turkey Test (read section 3)

As discussed by lots and lots of people, the "I" in Turkish behaves differently than in most languages. Per the Unicode standard, our lowercase "i" becomes "İ" (U+0130 "Latin Capital Letter I With Dot Above") when it moves to uppercase. Similarly, our uppercase "I" becomes "ı" (U+0131 "Latin Small Letter Dotless I") when it moves to lowercase.

Fix: Again, use an ordinal (raw byte) comparer, or invariant culture for comparisons unless you absolutely need culturally based linguistic comparisons (which give you uppercase I's with dots in Turkey)

And according to Microsoft you should not even be using the Invariant... but the Ordinal... (New Recommendations for Using Strings in Microsoft .NET 2.0)