strcasecmp

chris at cmbuckley dot co dot uk (2011-12-28 16:59:18)

A simple multibyte-safe case-insensitive string comparison:

<?php

function mb_strcasecmp($str1, $str2, $encoding = null) {
    if (null === $encoding) { $encoding = mb_internal_encoding(); }
    return strcmp(mb_strtoupper($str1, $encoding), mb_strtoupper($str2, $encoding));
}

?>

Caveat: watch out for edge cases like "?".

alvaro at demogracia dot com (2010-07-29 05:35:06)

Don't forget this is a single-byte function: in Unicode strings it'll provide incoherent results as soon as both strings differ only in case. There doesn't seem to exist a built-in multi-byte alternative so you need to write your own, taking into account both character encoding and collation.

(2002-08-27 06:53:49)

The sample above is only true on some platforms that only use a simple 'C' locale, where individual bytes are considered as complete characters that are converted to lowercase before being differentiated.
Other locales (see LC_COLLATE and LC_ALL) use the difference of collation order of characters, where characters may be groups of bytes taken from the input strings, or simply return -1, 0, or 1 as the collation order is not simply defined by comparing individual characters but by more complex rules.
Don't base your code on a specific non null value returned by strcmp() or strcasecmp(): it is not portable. Just consider the sign of the result and be sure to use the correct locale!