
¹ that includes GNU or you'd get an error that the = command is not found. What is the difference between ] and ?.Otherwise, depending on the implementation, it's either a byte-to-byte string comparison, or like for expr a strcoll() comparison, that is whether $a and $b sort the same. It would also fail for values of $a or $b that are expr operators like (, substr.Īwk - 'BEGIN' "$a" "$b": if $a and $b are recognised as numbers (at least decimal integer and floating point numbers like 1.2, -1.5e-4, leading trailing blanks ignored, some also recognising hexadecimal, octal or anything recognised by strtod()), then a numeric comparison is performed. Note that there are variations between shells as to how arithmetic expressions are evaluated and what numbers are supported (for instance bash and some implementation/versions of ksh don't support floating point or treat numbers with leading zeros as octal).Įxpr "$a" = "$b" does a number comparison if both operands are recognised as decimal integer numbers (some allowing blanks around the number), and otherwise checks if the two string operands have the same sorting order. Typically, that's used for comparing numbers. ((a = b)), from ksh and also found in zsh and bash, returns true if the evaluation of the arithmetic expression stored in $a yields the same number as that of $b. See also which would be the standard equivalent (except that POSIXly, the behaviour is only specified if $a and $b contain integer constants) of: In standard sh, pattern matching is done with case: case $a inįor completeness, other equality-like operators you may come across in shell scripts: Just like in any argument to any command, variable expansions must be quoted to prevent split+glob and empty removal (only the latter being performed in zsh), so: The [ command is standard, and the standard comparison operator there is = (though some [ implementations also recognise =¹). = is the same as = in any shell that supports ] (introduced by ksh). You need ] for byte-to-byte equality comparison. Google Sheets is a powerful and fee tool for organizing and analyzing data.] is not comparison, it's pattern matching. To make it easier to see and understand how to use the Google Sheets Does Not Equal syntax we have provided this template spreadsheet for you. What you may not realize is there is a second way to write this conceptually using the not() function. In Google Sheets the “Not Equals” symbol is for example, AB = TRUE. By using District “not equals” 3 it doesn’t matter how many other districts there are OR if more districts are added later on your formula still works. Luckily we case use the “not equals” operator instead of writing all those OR’s. Sure seems like a terrible use of time and space right? district = 100 to get everyone who ISN’T in district 3. Let’s fast forward into the future and we want to add 97 more districts for 100 districts total? We would have to add OR statements for every new district added: district = 1, OR district = 2, OR …. If we didn’t have the “not equals” logical operator we would have to write this as district = 1 OR district = 2 to get the answer. Google Sheets Not Equals – Student District Example You now want to see who is NOT in district 3. Annie and Bob are in district 1, Charlie and Dave are in district 2, and Evan and Fiona are in district 3.

Let’s say you have a list of students and the districts they are in. Not equals also works really well against lists that change over time. In my experience the most common use case for “Not Equals” is when you are dealing with filtering lists of things or comparing against a list of items. As you can imagine this compound symbol of != means opposite of equals. It is for this reason in most other languages not equals is actually a compound symbol of != where “!” means NOT or OPPOSITE and “=” means equals.

Evaluating A “not equals” A, returns FALSE.If Evaluating A “equals” A, returns to TRUE.The inverse statement works the same way with NOT EQUALS resulting in the OPPOSITE value. If two values are evaluated using EQUALS and return TRUE, then the same two values evaluated with NOT EQUALS will return FALSE. Not equals at its core is just the opposite evaluation of equals.
