Case insensitive std::string.find()

Question

I am using std::string\'s find() method to test if a string is a substring of another. Now I need case insensitive version of the same thing. For s

Answer 1

Since you're doing substring searches (std::string) and not element (character) searches, there's unfortunately no existing solution I'm aware of that's immediately accessible in the standard library to do this.

Nevertheless, it's easy enough to do: simply convert both strings to upper case (or both to lower case - I chose upper in this example).

std::string upper_string(const std::string& str)
{
    string upper;
    transform(str.begin(), str.end(), std::back_inserter(upper), toupper);
    return upper;
}

std::string::size_type find_str_ci(const std::string& str, const std::string& substr)
{
    return upper(str).find(upper(substr) );
}

This is not a fast solution (bordering into pessimization territory) but it's the only one I know of off-hand. It's also not that hard to implement your own case-insensitive substring finder if you are worried about efficiency.

Additionally, I need to support std::wstring/wchar_t. Any ideas?

tolower/toupper in locale will work on wide-strings as well, so the solution above should be just as applicable (simple change std::string to std::wstring).

[Edit] An alternative, as pointed out, is to adapt your own case-insensitive string type from basic_string by specifying your own character traits. This works if you can accept all string searches, comparisons, etc. to be case-insensitive for a given string type.