.net - How do I make my string compare not sensitive to (ignore) minor differences in white space?

Question

I have some tests that check strings that are displayed to the user.

I don’t wish the test to fail to due to changes in the indentations or line breaks etc. So I am looking for something like a string compare that.

• Ignore while space as the start of the string (easy use string.trim)
• When any number of any type of white space that is next to each other matches in the same way as if it was a single space.

I could start to create a regex, but someone else may have a better solution hence this question.

Answer 1

You can use CompareOptions:

String.Compare(a, b, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, CompareOptions.IgnoreSymbols);

Extract from MSDN:

Indicates that the string comparison must ignore symbols, such as white-space characters, punctuation, currency symbols, the percent sign, mathematical symbols, the ampersand, and so on.