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.

Let’s look at an example where we need to check if our string matches the regular expression ...