Basic C# question regarding strings and if statements

To deal with varying capitalization, I'd convert 'answer' to lower case and then just test the result against the lower case variants of the possible strings.

The other problem you have is that to test for equality you need to use the == operator. The = operator is used for assignment:

            string answer;
            string java;

            java = "java";
           
            Console.WriteLine("Java, C, Cobol or Python?");
            answer = Console.ReadLine();
            answer = answer.ToLower(); // now lower case

            if (answer == java){
                Console.WriteLine("Java text");
            }
            else if (answer == "c"){
                Console.WriteLine("C text");
            }
            else if (answer == "cobol"){
                Console.WriteLine("Cobol text");
            }
            else if (answer == "python"){
                Console.WriteLine("Python text");
            }
            else Console.WriteLine("x");
           

            Console.ReadLine();