How do you check if a term already exists in a term store?

Question

I currently have a term set of document types that goes two levels deep. I'm using a table that a poweruser manages to sync the terms in the term store.

The problem I'm having is when I compare a string field with existing term store labels it does not match 100% of the time even though that label exists. So when I try to create a term it throws an error.

For example

string label = "(A1)Doc Type A & Misc";
Term childTerm = parentTerm.Terms[label];

//This throws an error saying it can't find the term so I try:

Term childTerm = parentTerm.CreateTerm(label, lcid);

//This throws an error saying the term already exists

After stepping through the code I found that label seems to get transposed so when it is made a term. Specifically double spaces are turned into single spaces and & seems to be changed as well. The only solution I found was the query below which seemed very hackish.

Term foundTerm2 = parentTerm.Terms.Where(tr =>
Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Encoding.Default.GetBytes(tr.GetDefaultLabel(lcid))) ==
  Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Encoding.Default.GetBytes(label.Replace("  ", " ")))
                                        ).FirstOrDefault();

Question
Is there a cleaner way to determine if a term exists based off a given label? I'm currently working in SharePoint Server 2010

Answer 1

I don't know if my way is cleaner, but it works. I basically format the term the way SharePoint stores it and then check to see if it already exists.

http://nickhobbs.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/sharepoint-2010-managed-metadata-converts-ampersand-and-double-quotes-to-unicode/

 //set term the way SharePoint stores it so that we can get a good compare with items already in store


                    string tag = term.Trim();
                    if (tag.Contains('&'))
                    {
                        tag = tag.Replace('&', Convert.ToChar(0xff06));
                    }
                    if (tag.Contains("  "))
                    {
                        tag = Regex.Replace(tag, @"\s+", " ");
                    }
                    if (tag.Contains("\""))
                    {
                        tag = tag.Replace('\"', Convert.ToChar(0xff02));
                    }

                    Term keywordTerm;

                    if (!termSet[0].Terms.Any(t => t.Name == tag))
                    {
                        Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Red;
                        Console.WriteLine("Adding {0} to the term set", tag);
                        keywordTerm = termSet[0].CreateTerm(tag, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.LCID);
                        needToCommit = true;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Green;
                        Console.WriteLine("{0} already exists in the term set", tag);
                    }