Ignoring case in Dictionary keys

Question

How to ignore case in dictionary keys? I'm doing this:

var map = new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
map.Add("e", "Letter e lower case");

string value = null;
if (!map.TryGetValue("E", out value)) {
    Console.WriteLine("Not found");
}

And I already tried to use StringComparer.InvariantIgnoreCase, and the result is the same. It cannot find the letter "E" in uppercase.

EDIT: Could I'm having some kind of culture conflicts with my environment settings even using OrdinalIgnoreCase ?

Answer 1

StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase uses an internal call to Window API "nativeCompareOrdinalIgnoreCase" function in System.Globalization.TextInfo; so it is not Invariant Culture. Too bad the function in mscorlib.dll is internal, we can not test it out.

Anyhow, you should use StringComparer.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase instead of the former.

In case it still refuses to work, you can re-implement the IEqualityComparer

public class StringComparerIgnoreCase : IEqualityComparer<string>
{
    public bool Equals(string x, string y)
    {
        if (x != null && y != null)
        {
            return x.ToLowerInvariant() == y.ToLowerInvariant();
        }
        return false;
    }

    public int GetHashCode(string obj)
    {
        return obj.GetHashCode();
    }
}

Usage:

var map = new Dictionary<string, string>(new StringComparerIgnoreCase());

Answer 2

I tested it in others machines that I have (4 VMs, and 1 real) and discovered that only in my current VM (Win7 x64, us_eng, some portuguese settings, .net 4.5) the problem occurs. In my real machine and others VMs the test works fine, using OrdinalIgnoreCase as well InvariantIgnoreCase.

So, I guess that something very weird is in that environment, but I cannot spend time now to investigate it.

Unfortunately the question was flagged as useless by some guys, which demotivates my interesting to investigate it deeply.