String.Compare Method (String, String, Boolean, CultureInfo)

The comparison uses the culture parameter to obtain culture-specific information such as casing rules and the alphabetic order of individual characters. For example, a culture could specify that certain combinations of characters be treated as a single character, or uppercase and lowercase characters be compared in a particular way, or that the sorting order of a character depends on the characters that precede or follow it.

The comparison is performed using word sort rules. For more information about word, string, and ordinal sorts, see System.Globalization.CompareOptions.

One or both comparands can be null. By definition, any string, including the empty string (""), compares greater than a null reference; and two null references compare equal to each other.

The comparison terminates when an inequality is discovered or both strings have been compared. However, if the two strings compare equal to the end of one string, and the other string has characters remaining, then the string with remaining characters is considered greater. The return value is the result of the last comparison performed.

Unexpected results can occur when comparisons are affected by culture-specific casing rules. For example, in Turkish, the following example yields the wrong results because the file system in Turkish does not use linguistic casing rules for the letter "i" in "file".

static bool IsFileURI(String path)
{
    return (String.Compare(path, 0, "file:", 0, 5, true) == 0);
}

Compare the path name to "file" using an ordinal comparison. The correct code to do this is as follows:

static bool IsFileURI(String path)
{
    return (String.Compare(path, 0, "file:", 0, 5, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) == 0);
}

Character sets include ignorable characters. The Compare(String, String, Boolean, CultureInfo) method does not consider such characters when it performs a culture-sensitive comparison. For example, a case-insensitive comparison of "animal" with "Ani-mal" (using a soft hyphen, or U+00AD) using the invariant culture indicates that the two strings are equivalent, as the following example shows.

using System;
using System.Globalization;

public class Example
{
   public static void Main()
   {
      string s1 = "Ani\u00ADmal";
      string s2 = "animal";

      Console.WriteLine("Comparison of '{0}' and '{1}': {2}", 
                        s1, s2, String.Compare(s1, s2, true,
                        CultureInfo.InvariantCulture));
   }
}
// The example displays the following output: 
//       Comparison of 'ani-mal' and 'animal': 0

To recognize ignorable characters in a string comparison, call the Compare method and supply a value of either CompareOptions.Ordinal or CompareOptions.OrdinalIgnoreCase for the options parameter.

The following example demonstrates how culture can affect a comparison. In Czech - Czech Republic culture, "ch" is a single character that is greater than "d". However, in English - United States culture, "ch" consists of two characters, and "c" is less than "d".

using System;
using System.Globalization;

class Sample {
    public static void Main() {
    String str1 = "change";
    String str2 = "dollar";
    String relation = null;

    relation = symbol( String.Compare(str1, str2, false, new CultureInfo("en-US")) );
    Console.WriteLine("For en-US: {0} {1} {2}", str1, relation, str2);

    relation = symbol( String.Compare(str1, str2, false, new CultureInfo("cs-CZ")) );
    Console.WriteLine("For cs-CZ: {0} {1} {2}", str1, relation, str2);
    }

    private static String symbol(int r) {
    String s = "=";
    if      (r < 0) s = "<";
    else if (r > 0) s = ">";
    return s;
    }
}
/*
This example produces the following results.
For en-US: change < dollar
For cs-CZ: change > dollar
*/

.NET Framework

.NET Framework Client Profile

Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows 7, Windows Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 (Server Core Role not supported), Windows Server 2008 R2 (Server Core Role supported with SP1 or later; Itanium not supported)

The .NET Framework does not support all versions of every platform. For a list of the supported versions, see .NET Framework System Requirements.

Reference