Parameters

strA

The first string to compare.

strB

The second string to compare.

ignoreCase

true to ignore case during the comparison; otherwise, false.

Returns

A 32-bit signed integer that indicates the lexical relationship between the two comparands.

Less than zero	strA is less than strB.
Zero	strA equals strB.
Greater than zero	strA is greater than strB.

Remarks

The comparison uses the current culture 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.

Note:

When comparing strings, you should call the string.Compare(string, string, StringComparison) method, which requires that you explicitly specify the type of string comparison that the method uses. For more information, see Best Practices for Using Strings in the .NET Framework.

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".

code reference: System.String.Compare#12

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

code reference: System.String.Compare#13

Example

using System;
public class StringCompareExample {
 public static void Main() {
 string strA = "A STRING";
 string strB = "a string";
 int first = String.Compare( strA, strB, true );
 int second = String.Compare( strA, strB, false );
 Console.WriteLine( "When 'A STRING' is compared to 'a string' in a case-insensitive manner, the return value is {0}.", first );
 Console.WriteLine( "When 'A STRING' is compared to 'a string' in a case-sensitive manner, the return value is {0}.", second );
 }
}
   

Requirements