TITLE

Case ignoring eq and cmp operators

VERSION

  Maintainer: Markus Peter <warp@spin.de>
  Date: 24 Aug 2000
  Last Modified: 25 Sep 2000
  Mailing List: perl6-language@perl.org
  Number: 143
  Version: 2
  Status: Retired

ABSTRACT

Perl currently only has eq and cmp operators which work case-sensitively. It would be a useful addition to add case-insensitive equivalents.

DESCRIPTION

Problems with current ways to do it

Perl currently knows basically two methods for checking of equality of strings case-insensitively:

 uc($a) eq uc($b)
 $a =~ /^$b$/i

and for comparing them one:

 uc($a) cmp uc($b)

The probably worst about these statements is that they look ugly. Also, they further complicate statements and they are counter-intuitive for beginners - why should I change the case of variables if I only want to compare them?

The regexp mechanism has a case-insensitivity option (there's probably no proper way to simulate it there I admit). With this in mind most beginners will conclude the same is true for eq and cmp - after all Perl is strong in text processing so how could such a feature miss? Beginner code usually ends up using the case-insensitive regexps then instead of the easier to read uppercase/equals combination.

Proposal

We apply something similar to the regexp modifiers to eq and cmp as well, after a slash. The above examples would then be

  $a eq/i $b
  $a cmp/i $b

This still leaves some room for future additions to eq and cmp if desired (stupid example: like ignoring all white space in the comparison or whatever comes up)

IMPLEMENTATION

Probably has to be added to perl internals...

I wonder what will happen with overloads though - is eq/i a new operator to overload or is the case-insensitivity somehow magically done by the Perl interpreter even though eq was overloaded? This probably could lead to problems...

REFERENCES

perlop manpage for eq and cmp

String.equalsIgnoreCase() method in Java