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Comparing Strings with equals() and compareTo() methods in Java

Here, we are going to learn about the string compare methods – In this tutorial/example, we are comparing strings using equals(), compareTo() and == operator in Java.
Submitted by IncludeHelp, on July 12, 2019

Given strings and we have to compare them using equals() and compareTo() method.

• Java string equals() method
  Java string equals() method compares the content of two strings, If all characters are the same, it returns true, else it returns false.
• Java string compareTo() method
  Java string compareTo() method is called with a string and another string is supplied as an argument, it compares the strings based on the Unicode values of the characters in the strings. It returns a positive number, negative number or 0. If both strings have the same content, it returns 0.

Java code to compare the strings using equals(), compareTo() and == operator

// Comparing Strings with equals() and compareTo() 
// methods in Java

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        //strings
        String str1 = new String("ABC");
        String str2 = new String("PQR");

        //comparing strings using equals() method
        System.out.println(str1.equals(str2));
        System.out.println(str1.equals(str1));

        //comparing strings using == operator 
        System.out.println(str1 == str1);
        System.out.println(str1 == str2);

        //comparing strings using compareTo() method
        System.out.println(str1.compareTo(str1));
        System.out.println(str1.compareTo(str2));
    }
}

Output

false
true
true
false
0
-15

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