The relational operators are part of the comparison operators.

There are four relational operators; these are less-than ("<"), greater-than (">"), less-than-or-equal-to ("<=") and greater-than-or-equal-to (">="). These operators work with two values that don't necessarily have to be numbers, in which case they are converted to numbers behind the scene.

The result of a relational comparison is always a Boolean value (true, false).

Example:

var result = 5 < 24; //false

These are the rules that relational operators follow:

  • If the operands are number, regular numerical operation is performed;
  • If the operands are strings, the character codes of each are compared;
  • If one operand is a number, the other is converted into a number and regular operation is performed;
  • If an operand is an object, or a "Boolean, it will be converted into a number, and proceed as regular numerical operation.

When comparing the string types, a capital letters matter. That is because the character codes of uppercase letters are all lower than those of lowercase, for instance:

var res = "House" < "javascript"; //true

var res = "house" < "javascript"; //false

To be sure that a correct operation is performed, the best technique is to convert all the letters into lowercase by using method .toLowerCase(), as seen here:

var res = "House".toLowerCase() < "javascript".toLowerCase(); //false

Note that when using numbers in a string format (i.e. "20", instead of 20), they will be also compared as character codes, and not as number, like this:

var res = "5" < 12; //false

In some cases number strings cannot be meaningfully converted to real numbers and they become NaN, as show here:

var res = "b" < 5; // false

var res = "b" > 5; // false

As seen above, the result is always false because the letter "b" cannot be compared to a number in a meaningful way.

Example

The example with relational (comparison) operators in JavaScript:

 

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