Powershell Comparison Operators: Like vs Match

Here, we define two variables, a and b, and apply different equality operators. The equality operators are those operators, which check the equality of two values and also check that one value is greater or less than other value. Even though you can apply the above operators to strings, other operators should be used for this purpose. Basically, the operators described below perform substring searches and pattern matching. Similar to the PowerShell like operator, match and it’s opposite counterpart, notmatch, compares two strings return a boolean True or False value. Also, like the other operators, the same behavior can be applied for a collection as the example below demonstrates.

powershell like operator

In this case, the command returns True because PowerShell exists in the collection, as shown below. All the above 3 operators mentioned are the comparison operator in PowerShell. Match and Like operators are almost similar operator only difference is the Wildcard character and the Contains operator is entirely different. In this article, you learned about the PowerShell like operator and many others and how to use each operator for single values and collections.

The comma operator will create an array as a binary operator and creates an array with one member as a unary operator. If you place the comma operator before a single value, you can create a one-element array. This operator returns the result of one or more statements as an array.

How-to: Comparison Operators

This method is helpful when you have a list of items and want to know if a specific item is on the list. The value should be after the -contains operator and can be a literal value, a collection of values, or a variable. The PowerShell Contains operator is one of the Containment Operators. This operator determines whether a value exists in a given set.

The operator is one of those important programming concepts that you probably have been using but without having comprehensive knowledge about them. Understanding how operators work will lead to more efficient code. To illustrate this, let’s compare two variables against each other. In this article, I’ll go over the most common operators along with various examples of how they can be used. For further reading, take a look at the Microsoft help page too.

PowerShell -Like vs -Contains Comparison Operators

We can use PowerShell as a simple calculator by just typing expressions at the PowerShell prompt. The arithmetic expressions in PowerShell are evaluated from left to right as per the order of operations unless we use parentheses for grouping . The spaces between the operators are ignored in PowerShell to make things clearer. Here, we define a variables a and apply different type check operators. The type checking operators are used to check whether both the given objects are of the same type or not. Here, we define two variables, a and b, and apply different replacement operators.

  • Note that each value in the collection is comma-separated and encloses each element in quotation marks.
  • The -isnot operator returns the Boolean value True when the value on the left side of the operator is not specified as a Microsoft .NET type.
  • You’ve seen how the output differs based on the operator and whether scalar or collection.

At some point during your PowerShelling career you will need to test if “something” is found within a certain object. I find that I am usually faced with this situation when I am testing if a string “contains” a value or not. Microsoft Graph is an API for accessing data in various Microsoft services, including Azure Active Directory, Teams, and OneDrive…. As with other operators, this same functionality can be applied to collections too. The functions defined in Sample.ps1 will now be available after the script terminates. Returns an array of integers represented by the upper and lower bounds of integers on either side of the two consecutive dots.

Perhaps you’d like to find all instances in that array that equal the number 9. No problem, use the eq operator against the array to return all instances of the compared integer. You’d like to compare this variable’s value to the string value “PowerShell” to ensure they are equal. In the above example as you can see the $matches is not generated for collection of strings and is only generated for a single string input. I’ve put its process object into $single_proc, and you can see that I verified it was there.

Logical Operators

For example, -contains is used to find the process “powershell” in a list of processes. In this example the “powershell” process occurs twice in the list of processes; “True” is returned after finding the first instance. The comparison operators are used in PowerShell to compare the values.

It doesn’t matter if the status property is ‘Running’, ‘running’ or ‘RUNNING’. She has written about a range of different topics on various technologies, which include, Splunk, Tensorflow, Selenium, and CEH. She spends most of her time researching Make Serious Money With These 7 Tech Side Hustles on technology, and startups. PowerShell is intended to be an interactive command-line, but it’s also a programming language. As we advance into PowerShell knowledge, it’s inevitable for us to learn many of core computer programming concepts.

For example, run the below command to create an array containing a list of programming languages and store it in the $languages variable. Apart from strings, you can also use integers as the collection and test value. For example, the below command tests whether 3 exists in the collection of integers from 1 through 4. Similar to the eq operator that allows you to find instances in collections, you can do the same with the ge and gt operators too. PowerShell searches through each item in a collection and compares each value to the one you’ve provided. Just as eq and ceq test for equality, PowerShell has a pair of operators that do the exact opposite called ne and cne.

powershell like operator

Like any other programming language, operators are a basic building block of PowerShell. When creating a script or module, chances are that you’ll find that you need a PowerShell operator. A Walkthrough of SQL Schema There are several types of operators that can be used in PowerShell. The -notmatch operator returns the Boolean value True when the strings do not match using the wildcard characters.

PowerShell Variables

The -like operator returns the Boolean value TRUE if the strings are matched using the wildcard characters. In conclusion, use -contains to check if a value exists in an array and -like operator to check if a string matches a wildcard pattern expression. The -contains operator and -like operator are both PowerShell comparison operators. But -like is not a containment operator and instead a matching operator. The operator -notlike returns boolean True if no match found and False if there is a match. In case of using against a collection, it will return all other values that don’t match the pattern given on the right side of the -notlike operator.

Matching Based on Wildcards with the PowerShell Like Operator

The PowerShell creates a new scope for the script you run that functions and variables, the script creates are discarded when the script terminates. On the left side of the operator enter the format string and on the right side of the operator enter the objects to be formatted. For example, expression 3..6 outputs What is Spring Boot a four-element array and expression 6..4 outputs a three-element array . The Add AND operator is used to add the right operand to the left operand and assigns the result to the left operand. The Subtract AND operator is used to subtract right operand from the left operand and assigns the result to left operand.

The ceq operator is the exact same as eq with the exception of being case-sensitive. In the following example, you can see that we’re assigning the value PowerShell to the variable$string. Then, using the eq operator, the example is comparing the value of $string with the string powershell. Thus, the article explained in detail the like operator, its syntax and its usage with appropriate examples. The differences between each of the type is shown using sample programs and necessary explanation was provided.