This is a common situation: I needed to compare two strings with unknown capitalization – “country” versus “Country”. Since these words should be considered equal even though the second “Country” has a capital “C”, we can’t do a straight comparison on the two – we need to do a case-insensitive comparison.
Option 1: strcasecmp
Whenever possible developers should try to use built-in functions which are compiled code and (in general) run much faster than anything you could write. PHP has strcasecmp to case-insentively compare two strings. Sounds like a perfect match!
if ( strcasecmp('country','Country') != 0 ) {
// We have a match!
}
Option 2: strtolower
Always read the documentation, but draw your own conclusions. One commentator in the PHP documentation suggested developers never use strcasecmp, and use strtolower with regular equality like this:
if ( strtolower('country') === strtolower('Country') ) {
// We have a match
}
Test the Speed
Both methods accomplish the same thing, but do we really want to skip using strcasecmp()? Which is the better option?
I wrote this short script to run each option for 10 seconds and see which is faster:
And the results:
strtolower: Done 18440869 cycles in 10 seconds strcasecmp: Done 22187773 cycles in 10 seconds
So strcasecmp has the edge speed-wise, but not so huge that I would care to favour one over the other.
Apparantly strcasecmp does not support multi-byte (e.g. Unicode) characters, but I haven’t tested this. Presumably that would give strtolower an advantage over projects dealing with non-English input, however that is not the case at all in my particular use case so I did not explore this avenue any further. I also didn’t try against non-ascii characters, such as latin accents; including those would be an improvement on this test.
