Comparison Operators

Quick reference

• 00:05 In the last video we talked about assignment operators, and
• 00:07 in this video I wanna talk about comparison operators.
• 00:10 Comparison operators are incredibly important and so
• 00:13 much of programming is about comparing things.
• 00:16 Is this equal to that?
• 00:17 Is this greater than that?
• 00:19 Is this identical to that?
• 00:20 Later on, a few videos from now, we're gonna actually look at conditional
• 00:24 statements that allow us to actually test two different things
• 00:27 that says if this number is greater than that number, do this, otherwise, do that.
• 00:32 But, in order to do that we need comparison operators.
• 00:35 We need the operators that allows us to ask the question, is this equal?
• 00:40 Is this not equal?
• 00:41 Is this greater than?
• 00:42 That's what we're gonna talk about in this video.
• 00:43 And it's kind of hard to talk about it because until we learn how to
• 00:46 do conditional statement we can't actually see these used in real life.
• 00:50 The first one is kind of tricky,
• 00:52 how do we figure out if something is equal to something else?
• 00:55 How do we figure out if number 1 is equal to number 2,
• 00:57 would we write it like $number1 = $number2.
• 01:02 Or we couldn't because this equal to sign is an assignment operator.
• 01:07 If we wrote this, it would change number 1 from 10 into 5.
• 01:11 This would be saying, hey number 1 equals number 2.
• 01:15 Number 2 is 5, so that means number 1 is now 5.
• 01:18 That's not what we want here.
• 01:19 We want to compare, we don't want to assign.
• 01:22 To do this in PHP, to determine if these are equal or
• 01:25 not, we use a double equal to sign.
• 01:27 That means equal in comparison operator land.
• 01:30 Likewise, if we wanted to see if these are identical,
• 01:33 we would use triple equal to signs.
• 01:36 We wouldn't really do that with numbers because numbers are equal,
• 01:39 they're not identical.
• 01:40 But if you had, for instance, John and Elder and you wanted to see if these
• 01:44 are two identical, well this is obviously not identical, but
• 01:48 this is what you would use to test against that.
• 01:51 Equal identical also important not equal.
• 01:55 And PHP has a couple of ways to do not equal.
• 01:58 Exclamation point equal to, that means not equal, and that also means not equal.
• 02:04 And you can use both of these in different ways and
• 02:06 we'll see how to use them separately later on, but these mean not equal to.
• 02:11 Likewise, this means not identical and actually let's start a list here.
• 02:16 Equal, identical,
• 02:20 not equal, also not equal
• 02:28 Not identical.
• 02:31 Those are the main ones.
• 02:32 Now, these next few are very simple and you're probably already aware of them.
• 02:36 This is greater than, remember back from grade school math.
• 02:40 This is less than.
• 02:42 So this is saying, is this number greater than that number?
• 02:45 For instance, you would say 5 greater than 2, this is true.
• 02:49 5 greater than 10, this's false.
• 02:52 We'll get into using these in a couple of videos from now.
• 02:55 Finally, we have greater than or equal to.
• 02:58 Greater than or equal to.
• 03:01 And of course, less than or equal to.
• 03:03 It's kind of weird to see
• 03:07 these without actually using them but like I said, we'll use these very soon.
• 03:12 These are our comparison operators.
• 03:13 Write them down, remember them.
• 03:15 Equal and identical.
• 03:16 Not equal, not equal, not identical.
• 03:18 Pretty easy to wrap your brain around once you've used them a couple of times.
• 03:22 And of course this, greater than, equal to.
• 03:23 Greater than, less than, or equal to.
• 03:25 And we're almost through with our operator list.
• 03:27 We've got a couple more to do.
• 03:28 In the next video, we're gonna talk about increment operators.

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