Relational Operators (Programming Perl)

3.11. Relational Operators

Perl has two classes of relational operators. One class operates on numeric values, the other on string values, as shown in Table 3-5.

Table 3.5. Relational Operators

Numeric	String	Meaning
`>`	`gt`	Greater than
`>=`	`ge`	Greater than or equal to
`<`	`lt`	Less than
`<=`	`le`	Less than or equal to

These operators return 1 for true and "" for false. Note that relational operators are nonassociating, which means that $a < $b < $c is a syntax error.

In the absence of locale declarations, string comparisons are based on the ASCII/Unicode collating sequences, and, unlike in some computer languages, trailing spaces count in the comparison. With a locale declaration, the collation order specified by the locale is used. (Locale-based collation mechanisms may or may not interact well with the Unicode collation mechanisms currently in development.)