Methods for Comparing Strings

In a previous lesson, we touched upon String comparison by discussing how to test the equality of strings using the equality operator ==. In this lesson, we will look at a couple of built-in Scala methods which are specifically used for String comparison. Let’s get right into the first method.

matches

By now, we’ve had quite a bit of practice with regular expressions. matches is a method which compares a string with a regular expression; it matches a regular expression pattern with an entire string.

matches is called on the string that you want to compare a regular expression with. It’s a boolean type and returns true if the string matches and false if it doesn’t. The syntax is as follows.