c# - Searching a List<string> for an EXACT case insenitive match

Question

I have a list of words like so :

List<string> list = new List<string>();
list.Add("Horse");
list.Add("Shorse"):

I want to search the list for a specific string, regardless of case, but it has to be an EXACT match, if i do

if (list.Contains("horse",StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)) 
{ 
    //do something
}

It will find both Horse and Shorse.

How can i implement my own custom Contains method that will find an exact match?

Answer 1

You are already correctly looking for exact matches in your list. The only thing which you explicitly specified is that you want to ignore the case of the matches. So if you have a Horse in the list, you can also find it as horse, or hOrsE. But you cannot find it as orse:

List<string> list = new List<string>();
list.Add("Horse");
list.Add("Shorse");

// we can find it with different casing
Console.WriteLine(list.Contains("horse", StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)); // true
Console.WriteLine(list.Contains("shorse", StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)); // true

// but not elements that are not in the list
Console.WriteLine(list.Contains("orse", StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)); // false

// if we don’t want to ignore the case, we can also do that
Console.WriteLine(list.Contains("Horse")); // true
Console.WriteLine(list.Contains("Shorse")); // true
Console.WriteLine(list.Contains("horse")); // false
Console.WriteLine(list.Contains("shorse")); // false

// and let’s look at a list with only Shorse to be sure…
list.Clear();
list.Add("Shorse");
Console.WriteLine(list.Contains("horse")); // false