Comparison Operators

The following table lists the comparison operators provided by Visual Basic.

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Operator	Purpose	Example	Result
=	Equals	A = B	True if A equals B
<>	Not equals	A <> B	True if A does not equal B
<	Less than	A < B	True if A is less than B
<=	Less than or equal to	A <= B	True if A is less than or equal to B
>	Greater than	A > B	True if A is greater than B
>=	Greater than or equal to	A >= B	True if A is greater than or equal to B
Is	Equality of two objects	emp Is mgr	True if emp and mgr refer to the same object
IsNot	Inequality of two objects	emp IsNot mgr	True if emp and mgr refer to different objects
TypeOf...Is	Object is of a certain type	TypeOf(obj) True Is Manager	if obj points to a Manager object
Like	Matches a text pattern	A Like “-#”	True if A contains three digits, a dash, and four digits

The following table lists characters that have special meanings to the Like operator.

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Character(s)	Meaning
?	Matches any single character
*	Matches any zero or more characters
#	Matches any single digit
[characters]	Matches any of the characters between the brackets
[!characters]	Matches any character not between the brackets
A-Z	When inside brackets, matches any character in the range A to Z

The following table lists some useful Like patterns.

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Pattern	Meaning
[2-9]##-#	Seven-digit phone number
[2-9]##-[2-9]##-#	Ten-digit phone number including area code
1-[2-9]##-[2-9]##-#	Eleven-digit phone number beginning with 1 and area code
##	Five-digit ZIP code
##-#	Nine-digit ZIP+4 code
?*@?*.?*	e-mail address