Validate String against USPS State Abbreviations

Question

I need to validate a string against a list of the possible United States Postal Service state abbreviations, and Google is not offering me any direction.

I know of the obvious solution: and that is to code a horribly huge if (or switch) statement to check and compare against all 50 states, but I am asking on this forum since there has to be an easier way of doing this. Is there something out there that I could use to quickly do this the most efficient way possible? like any RegEx or something?

Answer 1

Try something like this:

private static String states = "|AL|AK|AS|AZ|AR|CA|CO|CT|DE|DC|FM|FL|GA|GU|HI|ID|IL|IN|IA|KS|KY|LA|ME|MH|MD|MA|MI|MN|MS|MO|MT|NE|NV|NH|NJ|NM|NY|NC|ND|MP|OH|OK|OR|PW|PA|PR|RI|SC|SD|TN|TX|UT|VT|VI|VA|WA|WV|WI|WY|";

public static bool isStateAbbreviation (String state)
{
  return state.Length == 2 && states.IndexOf( state ) > 0;
}

I'll guarantee that this will beat the Regex or Hashtable lookups every time, no matter how many runs you make, and it will have the least memory usage.