My_Variable = ' Hello ' IF My_Variable = 'Hello' THEN SAY 'It matches.'...results in the expression being true, and the SAY instruction is executed.
If you don't want leading and trailing blanks to be stripped before the comparison, then you can use the "strict" versions of the comparison operators.
| == | "equal to" |
| << | "less than" |
| >> | "greater than" |
| <<= | "less than or equal to" |
| >>= | "greater than or equal to" |
| \== or ^== | "not equal to" |
| \<< | "not less than" |
| \>> | "not greater than" |
For example,
My_Variable = ' Hello ' IF My_Variable == 'Hello' THEN SAY 'It matches.'...results in the expression being false, and the SAY instruction is not executed.
The strict operators are also useful if you wish to compare a variable with a numeric value as if it were a string. For example, consider the following two conditionals.
My_Variable = '0.0' IF My_Variable = 0 THEN SAY "It matches." IF My_Variable == 0 THEN SAY "It matches again."The first conditional doesn't use a strict operator when it compares My_Variable to 0. Therefore, the expression ends up being true. The second conditional uses the strict operator ==, and therefore the expression ends up being false. After all, although 0.0 is numerically the same as 0, the string '0.0' is not the same as '0'. There's a decimal point and second 0 in '0.0' which does not appear in '0', so as literal strings, these two aren't equal.