How to check if a word starts with a given character?

Question

I have a list of a Sharepoint items: each item has a title, a description and a type. I successfully retrieved it, I called it result. I want to first check if there is any item in result which starts with A then B then C, etc. I will have to do the same for each alphabet character and then if I find a word starting with this character I will have to display the character in bold.

I initially display the characters using this function:

private string generateHeaderScripts(char currentChar)
{
    string headerScriptHtml = "$(document).ready(function() {" +
        "$(\"#myTable" + currentChar.ToString() + "\") " +
        ".tablesorter({widthFixed: true, widgets: ['zebra']})" +
        ".tablesorterPager({container: $(\"#pager" + currentChar.ToString() +"\")}); " +
        "});";
    return headerScriptHtml;
}

How can I check if a word starts with a given character?

Answer 1

To check one value, use:

    string word = "Aword";
    if (word.StartsWith("A")) 
    {
        // do something
    }

You can make a little extension method to pass a list with A, B, and C

    public static bool StartsWithAny(this string source, IEnumerable<string> strings)
    {
        foreach (var valueToCheck in strings)
        {
            if (source.StartsWith(valueToCheck))
            {
                return true;
            }
        }

        return false;
    }

    if (word.StartsWithAny(new List<string>() { "A", "B", "C" })) 
    {
        // do something
    }

AND as a bonus, if you want to know what your string starts with, from a list, and do something based on that value:

    public static bool StartsWithAny(this string source, IEnumerable<string> strings, out string startsWithValue)
    {
        startsWithValue = null;

        foreach (var valueToCheck in strings)
        {
            if (source.StartsWith(valueToCheck))
            {
                startsWithValue = valueToCheck;
                return true;
            }
        }

        return false;
    }

Usage:

    string word = "AWord";
    string startsWithValue;
    if (word.StartsWithAny(new List<string>() { "a", "b", "c" }, out startsWithValue))
    {
        switch (startsWithValue)
        {
            case "A":
                // Do Something
                break;

            // etc.
        }
    }

Answer 2

You could do something like this to check for a specific character.

public bool StartsWith(string value, string currentChar) {
   return value.StartsWith(currentChar, true, null);
}

The StartsWith method has an option to ignore the case. The third parameter is to set the culture. If null, it just uses the current culture. With this method, you can loop through your words, run the check and process the word to highlight that first character as needed.