[Scummvm-devel] Make class String case insensitive by default?

[Max Horn]

Am 23.07.2006 um 15:53 schrieb Marcus Comstedt:

>
> "Johannes Schickel" <lordhoto at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I thought of adding one bool which is used for the mode to use, this
>> would of course need branching for every comparison function, but it
>> shouldn't be that slow nor a big waste of memory.
>
> 4 bytes per string adds up if there are many strings.

Indeed.

>   The subclass
> proposal is better as it relies on the vtable field which is already
> there.  Also it is less error prone as you don't add extra state to
> the strings which needs to be maintained.

Aye. Though it doesn't solve the problem of how to deal with  
comparing a "sensitive" string with an "insensitive one" (of course  
you never said it would). In particular, if not done careful, then
  a == b
and
  b == a
might return different values, which would be a big no-no.


> Even so, I agree with Oystein that sensitivity should be a property of
> the comparison, not the string.

So do I. Personally, I'd add
	bool equals(const String &x) const;
	bool equalsIgnoreCase(const String &x) const;
	bool compareTo(const String &x) const;
	bool compareToIgnoreCase(const String &x) const;
methods (those names are taken from Java, and of course don't quite  
fit in; this is just a quick example), as others already suggested.

It really just boils down to the default behavior of == and != (i.e.  
to which of the above methods do they map). I just run a check on the  
code to find all places where String's comparison operators are used.  
In virtually all places, ignoring the case should be perfectly fine  
and safe.


Bye,
Max