Programming Tutorials

How to use equals() and equalsIgnoreCase() in Java

By: Fazal in Java Tutorials on 2007-09-02  

To compare two strings for equality, use equals(). It has this general form:

boolean equals(Object str)

Here, str is the String object being compared with the invoking String object. It returns true if the strings contain the same characters in the same order, and false otherwise.

The comparison is case-sensitive. To perform a comparison that ignores case differences, call equalsIgnoreCase(). When it compares two strings, it considers A-Z to be the same as a-z. It has this general form:

boolean equalsIgnoreCase(String str)

Here, str is the String object being compared with the invoking String object. It, too, returns true if the strings contain the same characters in the same order, and false otherwise. Here is an example that demonstrates equals() and equalsIgnoreCase():

// Demonstrate equals() and equalsIgnoreCase().
class equalsDemo {
    public static void main(String args[]) {
        String s1 = "Hello";
        String s2 = "Hello";
        String s3 = "Good-bye";
        String s4 = "HELLO";
        System.out.println(s1 + " equals " + s2 + " -> " +
                s1.equals(s2));
        System.out.println(s1 + " equals " + s3 + " -> " +
                s1.equals(s3));
        System.out.println(s1 + " equals " + s4 + " -> " +
                s1.equals(s4));
        System.out.println(s1 + " equalsIgnoreCase " + s4 + " -> " +
                s1.equalsIgnoreCase(s4));
    }
}

The output from the program is shown here:

Hello equals Hello -> true
Hello equals Good-bye -> false
Hello equals HELLO -> false
Hello equalsIgnoreCase HELLO -> true