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P A R S E - O - M A T I C
U S E R
M A N U A L
—
C O M P A R A T O R S
Literal Comparators
Here is a list of the literal comparators:
Comparator
=
<>
>
>=
<
<=
^
~
Is
Longer
Shorter
SameLen
Meaning
Identical
Not identical
Higher
Higher, or identical
Lower
Lower, or identical
Contains
Does not contain
Basically the same
Length is longer
Length is shorter
Length is the same
Comments
See
See
See
See
Note
Note
Note
Note
#
#
#
#
1
1
1
1
See Note # 2
Note # 1: Depends on sort order. For a discussion of what this means, refer to the
section ―Literal Comparisons and Sort Order‖.
Note # 2: The two values are considered basically the same if they contain the same
text, regardless of upper or lower case, and any surrounding whitespace. Thus '
CHESHIRE CAT ' is the considered the same as 'Cheshire Cat'.
Examples
With some restrictions (discussed later), literal comparators work on both numeric and
alphabetic data. Here are some examples of literal comparisons that are true:
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
<>
<=
<
Shorter
>=
<=
=
SameLen
^
^
'ABCD'
'ABCD'
'ABCD'
'ABCD'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'AB'
'ABC'
'333'
'333'
'333'
'333'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
'ABC'
<>
<=
<
SameLen
<>
<=
<
SameLen
~
~
'444'
'444'
'444'
'444'
'CDE'
'CDE'
'CDE'
'CDE'
'CD'
'CC'
Note especially the ^ (contains) and ~ (does not contain) comparators. These are
extremely useful when analyzing data.
Literal Comparisons and Sort Order
Some of the literal comparators compare text according to 'PC-ASCII sort order'. For
plain English text, this works fine. However, if your text contains diacritical (accented)
characters, you should be aware that some comparisons will not work correctly. For
example, the 'o-circumflex' character (ô) appears in the PC-ASCII character set after the
PC-ASCII value for 'Z'.
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