Built-in operators

Built-in operators are a subset of the operators supported in Groovy. They provide the same behavior and result as their counterparts in Groovy.

The following table shows a summary of the built-in operators.

Table 1. Summary of the built-in operators
Operator Result type Description
not Boolean The unary not operator applies to a Boolean expression and performs a Boolean negation. It is equivalent to the Groovy ! operator. For example, the expression not TRUE yields FALSE.

and

&&

Boolean Performs a short-circuit Boolean "and" operation. For example, the expression TRUE AND TRUE yields TRUE, and TRUE AND FALSE yields FALSE.

or

||

Boolean Performs a short-circuit Boolean "or" operation. For example, the expression TRUE OR FALSE yields TRUE, and FALSE AND FALSE yields FALSE.
+ Depends on types of left and right operands

When used with numeric types such as Integer, Float, BigDecimal performs an arithmetic addition.

When used with operands of type String, performs a string concatenation.

For full details see the Groovy website athttp://groovy.codehaus.org/Operators.

< Boolean

Performs a less-than comparison. For numeric types such as Integer, Float, and BigDecimal, this is a signed arithmetic comparison. It can also be used to compare strings, and to compare dates.

For full details see the Groovy website.

<= Boolean

Performs a less-than-or-equal comparison. For numeric types such as Integer, Float, and BigDecimal, this is a signed arithmetic comparison. It can also be used to compare strings and dates.

For full details see the Groovy website.

> Boolean

Performs a greater-than comparison. For numeric types such as Integer, Float, and BigDecimal, this is a signed arithmetic comparison. It can also be used to compare strings and dates.

For full details see the Groovy website.

>= Boolean

Performs a greater-than-or-equal comparison. For numeric types such as Integer, Float, and BigDecimal, this is a signed arithmetic comparison. It can also be used to compare strings and dates.

For full details see the Groovy website.

=

==

Boolean

Performs an equals comparison. For numeric types such as Integer, Float, and BigDecimal, this is a signed arithmetic comparison. It can also be used to compare strings and dates.

For full details see the Groovy website.

!= Boolean

Performs a not-equals comparison. For numeric types such as Integer, Float, and BigDecimal, this is a signed arithmetic comparison. It can also be used to compare strings and dates.

For full details see the Groovy website.

~ Boolean

Performs a shell pattern match. The character "*" is a wildcard matching zero, one, or many characters. The character "?" matches any single character. Shell pattern matches are case-sensitive on UNIX, and not case-sensitive on Windows.

Example: %name ~ '*.c'

The example would return TRUE for names such as example.c or a.txt.c and return FALSE for names such as abc or a.cc.

=~ Boolean

Performs a regular expression match. The operand after =~ must be a string that is a valid regular expression. Regular expression matches are case-sensitive by default on all platforms, but can be made not case-sensitive using the (?i) option embedded in the pattern.

Example: %name =~ '.*\\.c'

The example would return TRUE for names such as example.c or a.txt.c and return FALSE for names such as abc or a.cc.

For full details see the Groovy website.


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