Code Inspection: String.CompareTo is culture-specific

Similarly to the Specify a culture in string conversion explicitly, this inspection helps to avoid problems with running your code on machines with different culture settings.

When strings are compared using String.CompareTo, comparison results may differ depending on the machine's locale. The canonical example is the Turkish where there is a lowercase dotless "ı" with the corresponding uppercase "I", and a lowercase "i" with an uppercase "İ" with the dot. As a result, the method below may return different results on machines with different culture settings.

To resolve this problem, ReSharper suggests adding the culture-invariant StringComparison.Ordinal explicitly to the method call.

            
private int Foo(string s1, string s2)
{
    //do something

    // 's1' will be compared to 's2'
    // according to the current
    // culture settings
    // Warning: String.CompareTo
    // is culture-specific
    return s1.CompareTo(s2);
}

        

            
private int Foo(string s1, string s2)
{
    //do something

    return String.Compare(s1, s2,
        StringComparison.Ordinal);
}

        

Last modified: 21 July 2022