Searching Country by Country code

Question

I am working on a search method, which will be called with Ajax, and updates a Webgrid in Mvc4. The search will go through a list of Project objects, which contains some fields.

One of the fields is Country. And right now my code only checks if the input string contains the search string:

private bool StringStartWith(string input, string searchstring)
{

    bool startwith = false;
    var inputlist = new List<string>(input.ToLower().Split(' ').Distinct());
    var searchList = new List<string>(searchstring.ToLower().Split(' '));

    var count = (from inp in inputlist from sear in searchList where inp.StartsWith(sear) select inp).Count();
    if (count == searchList.Count)
        startwith = true;
    return startwith;
}

But I also want to be able to search by country code. So if I write "DK", it should tell that it is equal to Denmark.

I hope I can get some help for it. Thanks.

//UPDATE!!

iTURTEV answer helped me to make my method work as it should. I just had to update my method as shown here:

        private bool InputStartWithSearch(string input, string searchstring)
    {
        if(searchstring[searchstring.Length-1].Equals(' '))
            searchstring = searchstring.Substring(0,searchstring.Length-2);

        bool startwith = false;
        var inputlist = new List<string>(input.ToLower().Split(' ').Distinct());
        var searchList = new List<string>(searchstring.ToLower().Split(' '));

        if (searchstring.Length == 2)
        {
            var countryCode = new RegionInfo(searchstring.ToUpper()).EnglishName;
            if (inputlist.Any(country => country.ToLower().Equals(countryCode.ToLower())))
            {
                return true;
            }
        }
        var count = (from inp in inputlist from sear in searchList where inp.StartsWith(sear) select inp).Count();
        if (count == searchList.Count)
            startwith = true;
        return startwith;
    }

Thanks a lot.

Maybe you got a list of country objects? Or a database table? You need some way to map the code to the country, but you've specified not enough info to tell us where you would want that information to come from. — GolezTrol, Oct 07 '13 at 08:07
@GolezTrol is right using a database table would save you all this around the world looping, plus try to explain a bit more. — wam090, Oct 07 '13 at 08:14

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 07 '13 at 08:35

1

May be you can use RegionInfo:

// returns Bulgaria
new RegionInfo("BG").EnglishName;

answered Oct 07 '13 at 08:35

iTURTEV

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1
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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 07 '13 at 08:25

Assuming:

public class Country {
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string IsoCode { get; set; }
}

Then:

return x.Countries.Where(q => 
    q.Name != null && q.Name.ToLowerInvariant().Contains(text) || 
    q.IsoCode != null && q.IsoCode.ToLowerInvariant().Contains(text));

This will return every Country having text on its name or code. It's important to check for nulls unless you're using [Required] data annotation, if you don't want this to be case insensitive you could remove the .ToLowerInvariant().

Searching Country by Country code

2 Answers2