String Objects – Case Sensitivity

In JavaScript, case matters. It is a case sensitive language. Because of that, you have to keep in mind that when you are working with data, you might have equivalent data, but JavaScript does not see it as such.

For example, the string “javascript rules!” is equivalent in data to the string “JavaScript Rules!”. Yes, the cases are different, you could argue they are not the same, but they essentially say the same thing.

So, say you are comparing two strings and you do not want case to matter. How do you do that? Thankfully, JavaScript provides a way to handle this using one of two methods…toLowerCase() and toUpperCase().

Here is an example…

// Declare two variables to hold string data
var firstText = "javascript rules!";
var secondText = "JavaScript Rules!";
// Compare the string variables
// This will not run due to case sensitivity
if(firstText === secondText){
    console.log("The data equals");
}
// The following should output to the console due to the case issues being fixed
if(firstText.toLowerCase() === secondText.toLowerCase()){
    console.log("Now...the data equals");
}

You can do the same thing with toUpperCase(). Hopefully, this will help you when you need to compare two strings.

Happy Coding!

Clay Hess