Case-insensitive search

Question

Yeah, use .match, rather than .search. The result from the .match call will return the actual string that was matched itself, but it can still be used as a boolean value.

var string = "Stackoverflow is the BEST";
var result = string.match(/best/i);
// result == 'BEST';

if (result){
    alert('Matched');
}

Using a regular expression like that is probably the tidiest and most obvious way to do that in JavaScript, but bear in mind it is a regular expression, and thus can contain regex metacharacters. If you want to take the string from elsewhere (eg, user input), or if you want to avoid having to escape a lot of metacharacters, then you're probably best using indexOf like this:

matchString = 'best';
// If the match string is coming from user input you could do
// matchString = userInput.toLowerCase() here.

if (string.toLowerCase().indexOf(matchString) != -1){
    alert('Matched');
}

Replace

var result= string.search(/searchstring/i);

with

var result= string.search(new RegExp(searchstring, "i"));

If you're just searching for a string rather than a more complicated regular expression, you can use indexOf() - but remember to lowercase both strings first because indexOf() is case sensitive:

var string="Stackoverflow is the BEST"; 
var searchstring="best";

// lowercase both strings
var lcString=string.toLowerCase();
var lcSearchString=searchstring.toLowerCase();

var result = lcString.indexOf(lcSearchString)>=0;
alert(result);

Or in a single line:

var result = string.toLowerCase().indexOf(searchstring.toLowerCase())>=0;

Suppose we want to find the string variable needle in the string variable haystack. There are three gotchas:

1. Internationalized applications should avoid string.toUpperCase and string.toLowerCase. Use a regular expression which ignores case instead. For example, var needleRegExp = new RegExp(needle, "i"); followed by needleRegExp.test(haystack).
2. In general, you might not know the value of needle. Be careful that needle does not contain any regular expression special characters. Escape these using needle.replace(/[-[\]{}()*+?.,\\^$|#\s]/g, "\\$&");.
3. In other cases, if you want to precisely match needle and haystack, just ignoring case, make sure to add "^" at the start and "$" at the end of your regular expression constructor.

Taking points (1) and (2) into consideration, an example would be:

var haystack = "A. BAIL. Of. Hay.";
var needle = "bail.";
var needleRegExp = new RegExp(needle.replace(/[-[\]{}()*+?.,\\^$|#\s]/g, "\\$&"), "i");
var result = needleRegExp.test(haystack);
alert(result);

ES6+:

let string="Stackoverflow is the BEST";
let searchstring="best";


let found = string.toLowerCase()
                  .includes(searchstring.toLowerCase());

includes() returns true if searchString appears at one or more positions or false otherwise.

If you are concerned about the "unterminated character class" case, removing all non-alphanumeric chars would be helpful:

searchstring = searchstring.replace(/[^a-zA-Z 0-9]+/g,'');