Batch not-equal inequality operator

Question

According to this       is the not-equal string operator  Trying it  I get   C   gt  if  asdf        fdas  echo asdf      was unexpected at this time    What am I doing wrong

User · Answer

NEQ is usually used for numbers and    is typically used for string comparison   I cannot find any documentation that mentions a specific and equivalent inequality operand for string comparison  in place of NEQ    The solution using IF NOT    seems the most sound approach   I can t immediately think of a circumstance in which the evaluation of operations in a batch file would cause an issue or unexpected behavior when applying the IF NOT    comparison method to strings   I wish I could offer insight into how the two functions behave differently on a lower level - would disassembling separate batch files  that use NEQ and IF NOT     offer any clues in terms of which  unofficially documented  native API calls conhost exe is utilizing

User · Answer

Try   if not  asdf      fdas  echo asdf   That works for me on Windows XP  I get the same error as you for the code you posted

User · Answer

I know this is quite out of date  but this might still be useful for those coming late to the party   EDIT  updated since this still gets traffic and  Goozak has pointed out in the comments that my original analysis of the sample was incorrect as well    I pulled this from the example code in your link    IF   1    GOTO VIEWDATA REM  IF NO COMMAND-LINE ARG    FIND   1  C  BOZO BOOKLIST TXT GOTO EXIT0 REM  PRINT LINE WITH STRING MATCH  THEN EXIT    VIEWDATA TYPE C  BOZO BOOKLIST TXT   MORE REM  SHOW ENTIRE FILE  1 PAGE AT A TIME    EXIT0     1    is simply an idiomatic use of    intended to verify that the thing on the left  that contains your variable  is different from the thing on the right  that does not  The   in this case is just a character placeholder  It could be anything  If  1 has content  then the equality will be false  if it does not you ll just be comparing   to   and it will be true        is not an operator  so writing  asdf        fdas  is pretty nonsensical   The suggestion to use if not  asdf      fdas  is definitely the way to go

User · Answer

Use NEQ instead   if  asdf  NEQ  fdas  echo asdf

User · Answer

Try  if NOT  asdf      fdas  echo asdf

[batch-file] Batch not-equal (inequality) operator

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