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=head1 TITLE
Case ignoring eq and cmp operators
=head1 VERSION
Maintainer: Markus Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 24 Aug 2000
Version: 1
Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Number: 143
=head1 ABSTRACT
Perl currently only has C<eq> and C<cmp> operators which work case-sensitively.
It would be a useful addition to add case-insensitive equivalents.
=head1 DESCRIPTION
=head2 Problems with current ways to do it
Perl currently knows basically two methods for checking of equality of
strings case-insensitively:
uc($a) eq uc($b)
$a =~ /^$b$/i
and for comparing them one:
uc($a) cmp uc($b)
The probably worst about these statements is that they look ugly. Also,
they further complicate statements and they are counter-intuitive for
beginners - why should I change the case of variables if I only want
to compare them?
The regexp mechanism has a case-insensitivity option (there's probably
no proper way to simulate it there I admit). With this in mind most
beginners will conclude the same is true for eq and cmp - after all
Perl is strong in text processing so how could such a feature miss?
Beginner code usually ends up using the case-insensitive regexps then
instead of the easier to read uppercase/equals combination.
=head2 Proposal
We apply something similar to the regexp modifiers to C<eq> and C<cmp>
as well, after a slash. The above examples would then be
$a eq/i $b
$a cmp/i $b
This still leaves some room for future additions to eq and cmp if desired
(stupid example: like ignoring all white space in the comparison or
whatever comes up)
=head1 IMPLEMENTATION
Probably has to be added to perl internals...
I wonder what will happen with overloads though - is eq/i a new operator
to overload or is the case-insensitivity somehow magically done by the
Perl interpreter even though eq was overloaded? This probably could lead
to problems...
=head1 REFERENCES
perlop manpage for eq and cmp
String.equalsIgnoreCase() method in Java
