[API Proposal]: ReadOnlySpan<char>.StartsWithAny(SearchValues<string>) and ReadOnlySpan<char>.EndsWithAny(SearchValues<string>)

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
csharp
Domain
api

Research direction

Start by reading the proposed MemoryExtensions APIs and the related issue #94155 to understand the existing SearchValues span extensions. Investigate the surrounding runtime API and testing conventions before deciding whether the proposal fits. Done means both StartsWithAny and EndsWithAny APIs are designed, implemented, and validated consistently with the existing extensions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

api-suggestion area-System.Memory
Background and motivation

There currently doesn't seem to be a means of checking whether the beginning or the end of a string equals to any of the values contained in a specified set of values in an optimized way using SearchValues<string> that was introduced in .NET 9. There are other specialized extension APIs involving ReadOnlySpan<char> and SearchValues<string> that were recently added (e.g. IndexOfAny<T>(ReadOnlySpan<char>, SearchValues<string>), ContainsAny(ReadOnlySpan<char>, SearchValues<string>) et al.) but this particular API seems to be missing.

One use case could be if you need to efficiently check whether a string starts with any one of a particular set of prefixes in order to determine whether your application code supports or handles that particular item.

See also #94155.

API Proposal
namespace System;

public static class MemoryExtensions
{
    // Proposed
    public static bool StartsWithAny(this System.ReadOnlySpan<char> span, System.Buffers.SearchValues<string> values);
    public static bool EndsWithAny(this System.ReadOnlySpan<char> span, System.Buffers.SearchValues<string> values);
}
API Usage
var searchValues = SearchValues.Create(new[] { "P1", A99", "B44" }.AsSpan(), StringComparison.Ordinal);

var isSupported = "testValue".StartsWithAny(searchValues);
var isSupported2 = "testValue".EndsWithAny(searchValues);
Alternative Designs

N/A

Risks

N/A

Dominant language
C#
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