Re: Comparing strings case insensitive

The first is clearer and less error prone (woe unto you if $str2 ever contains metacharacters as is), but presuming a recent perl both should be equally speedy.

Update: Wow, I must have heard wrong about the re speedups or something; I thought that they supposedly had gotten optimized so fixed strings were on the same order as a vanilla comparison but as the benchmark below shows that's not the case. So yeah, definitely option one.

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

Comment on Re: Comparing strings case insensitive Download Code

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Re^2: Comparing strings case insensitive by LesleyB (Friar) on Sep 12, 2008 at 21:26 UTC
So the lower cased string comparison is more robust than the regexp?	[reply]
Re^3: Comparing strings case insensitive by Fletch (Bishop) on Sep 12, 2008 at 21:39 UTC
Yes, because `lc "alligatorz" eq lc "a.z"` will properly compare as unequal, whereas `"alligatorz" =~ /^a.z$/i` incorrectly (for what you're trying to do) will match. That's what I mentioned about robustness, but again with the proper application of `\Q` that wouldn't be an issue. That being said, I'd still use the `lc $x eq lc $y` version vice the `\Q`-ified regexp match as it's more explicit that you're doing a case insensitive comparison between fixed strings. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie. The cake is a lie.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Comparing strings case insensitive by kyle (Abbot) on Sep 12, 2008 at 21:28 UTC
So the lower cased string comparison is more robust than the regexp? Yes.	[reply]