Ignoring accented letters in string comparison

Question

I need to compare 2 strings in C# and treat accented letters the same as non-accented letters. For example:

string s1 = \"hello\";
string s2 = \"héllo\";

s1         


        

Answer 1

The following method CompareIgnoreAccents(...) works on your example data. Here is the article where I got my background information: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/EncodingAccents.aspx

private static bool CompareIgnoreAccents(string s1, string s2)
{
    return string.Compare(
        RemoveAccents(s1), RemoveAccents(s2), StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) == 0;
}

private static string RemoveAccents(string s)
{
    Encoding destEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-8");

    return destEncoding.GetString(
        Encoding.Convert(Encoding.UTF8, destEncoding, Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(s)));
}

I think an extension method would be better:

public static string RemoveAccents(this string s)
{
    Encoding destEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-8");

    return destEncoding.GetString(
        Encoding.Convert(Encoding.UTF8, destEncoding, Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(s)));
}

Then the use would be this:

if(string.Compare(s1.RemoveAccents(), s2.RemoveAccents(), true) == 0) {
   ...