Thread: String Comparison

Originally Posted by tabstop

If you've got strings (real strings, not fake strings), you can almost use < (I think the basic less-than will be case-sensitive, and not necessarily in a good way). Otherwise you write your own.

I also have no idea how you think "the whole string compared" and "character by character, returning a value once there is an inequality" could possibly be different, but oh well.

I don't think that you are right in the use of < or >, at least not in the sense I'm asking about.

It will, from what I can tell, compare character by character. Once an inequality is found, it will return the value. If that specific character is > or < the other character being compared, it returns + or - value.

I want to know about the entire string.

i.e.
On < March

If you just use < or >, it will show On > March. This is not true for my use. I want to essentially sum up the values (ascii) of each character of the strings, and compare these sums. This is what I meant by "whole string". I don't want a value returned as soon as str1[x] != str2[x].

That is not a workaround though. Based on your requirements, that is precisely what you should do.

Originally Posted by mikeman

I was just thinking that there was an internal way of doing it that didn't require writing a separate function.

You could #include <numeric> and then use the return value of std::accumulate(str.begin(), str.end(), 0) for a given std::string str. You may also want to cache this value to avoid re-computing it for each comparison.