Problems searching through a list

[rosin tuck]

Hey i have written a method to take two lists of strings as input, merge these two lists together, then go through each list individually and if it contains a word in the merge list, to return 1 otherwise return 0. However currently this only checks if the "exact" same string is in the list, as in it is case sensitive, i need it to be case insensitive for what i am trying to do

 
float checkWords(List list1, List list2)
     {
 
   List mergeList = new ArrayList();
   mergeList.addAll(list1);
   mergeList.addAll(list2);
   int count1= 0;
   int count2 = 0;
 
      
   Iterator iterW = mergeList.iterator();
while ( iterW.hasNext()){
          
  String e = (String)iterW.next();              
          
         if(list1.contains(e)) {
   count1 = 1;
          System.out.println("List1 inside: " +count1)          System.out.println(e);
         }else {
          count1 = 0;                               System.out.println("List1 inside: "+count1);
   System.out.println(e);
         }
         if(list2.contains(e)) {
        count2 = 1;
              System.out.println("List2 inside: " +count2);
          System.out.println(e + "\n");
   } else {
 count2 = 0;
         System.out.println(" List2 inside: " +count2);
 System.out.println(e + "\n");
       }
          
         count1 = 0;
 count2 = 0;
 }
          
       return count1; 
}
}

The return statement here is redundant i am just returning an int to test the method. Does anybody know how i can perform the same test while ignoring case? I would appreciate any help
Thanks

[Stan James]

I think you said the problem is that you want to ignore case so "hello" matches "Hello" in your search?

You could put everything into the list in lower case and do contains(word.toLowerCase())

You could make your own class instead of Strings ... something that holds a String and has an equals() method that ignores case.

Either of those sound useful?