17) IF Statements and Strings

You can do comparisons on characters since they’re just stored via integer. But what about strings?
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2
3
4
5
     string1 = "Bill";
     string2 = "bill";
     if (string1 == string2)
     if (string1 < string2)
     if (string1 > string2)
The first if is self explanatory. If they’re both the same, then it gets triggered. They have to be the exact same for it to work.

The second and third however can be confusing. Here’s how the comparison works:

When two strings are compared, they aren’t compared fully. They’re compared letter by letter.
if (string1 == string2) checks this:

  • is first letter of string1 == first letter of string2?

  • if yes, is second letter of string1 == second letter of string2?

  • if yes, is third letter of string1 == third letter of string2?

  • if yes, is fourth letter of string1 == fourth letter of string2?

And so on. It checks until there aren’t any more letters to check. If at some point they’re not equal then the overall check is considered false.
For < and >, it goes through the exact same steps, with just the symbols replaced.

if (string1 > string2) checks this:

  • is first letter of string1 > first letter of string2?

  • if yes, is second letter of string1 > second letter of string2?

  • if yes, is third letter of string1 > third letter of string2?

  • if yes, is fourth letter of string1 > fourth letter of string2?

And so on.
< would do the exact same thing too.

But what if the strings are different sized?
Doesn’t matter. The thing is, the process only goes until it either breaks or it gets through every single string.

One thing to note, though,
Doing (string1 > string2) is VERY different from doing (“Bill” > “bill”) or (“Bill” < “bill”).

This is not something that concerns beginners much, but all you have to know is, a set of characters written inside some “double quotation marks” is just a String Literal. It is NOT a String!

We’ll learn this later. Don’t worry about it for now. Remember, declare your variables!