PHP 7.0.6 Released

strcasecmp

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7)

strcasecmpBinary safe case-insensitive string comparison

Description

int strcasecmp ( string $str1 , string $str2 )

Binary safe case-insensitive string comparison.

Parameters

str1

The first string

str2

The second string

Return Values

Returns < 0 if str1 is less than str2; > 0 if str1 is greater than str2, and 0 if they are equal.

Examples

Example #1 strcasecmp() example

<?php
$var1 
"Hello";
$var2 "hello";
if (
strcasecmp($var1$var2) == 0) {
    echo 
'$var1 is equal to $var2 in a case-insensitive string comparison';
}
?>

See Also

  • strcmp() - Binary safe string comparison
  • preg_match() - Perform a regular expression match
  • substr_compare() - Binary safe comparison of two strings from an offset, up to length characters
  • strncasecmp() - Binary safe case-insensitive string comparison of the first n characters
  • stristr() - Case-insensitive strstr
  • substr() - Return part of a string

User Contributed Notes

chris at cmbuckley dot co dot uk
4 years ago
A simple multibyte-safe case-insensitive string comparison:

<?php

function mb_strcasecmp($str1, $str2, $encoding = null) {
    if (
null === $encoding) { $encoding = mb_internal_encoding(); }
    return
strcmp(mb_strtoupper($str1, $encoding), mb_strtoupper($str2, $encoding));
}

?>

Caveat: watch out for edge cases like "ß".
Anonymous
13 years ago
The sample above is only true on some platforms that only use a simple 'C' locale, where individual bytes are considered as complete characters that are converted to lowercase before being differentiated.

Other locales (see LC_COLLATE and LC_ALL) use the difference of collation order of characters, where characters may be groups of bytes taken from the input strings, or simply return -1, 0, or 1 as the collation order is not simply defined by comparing individual characters but by more complex rules.

Don't base your code on a specific non null value returned by strcmp() or strcasecmp(): it is not portable. Just consider the sign of the result and be sure to use the correct locale!
alvaro at demogracia dot com
5 years ago
Don't forget this is a single-byte function: in Unicode strings it'll provide incoherent results as soon as both strings differ only in case. There doesn't seem to exist a built-in multi-byte alternative so you need to write your own, taking into account both character encoding and collation.
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