# 7.13. strings are comparable¶

All the comparison operators that work on ints and doubles also work on strings.

Take a look at the active code below, which checks to see if word is equal to "banana".

The other comparison operations are useful for putting words in alphabetical order.

The active code below uses comparison operators to determine the ordering of word relative to "banana".

You should be aware, though, that the string class does not handle upper and lower case letters the same way that people do. All the upper case letters come before all the lower case letters. As a result,

Your word, Zebra, comes before banana.


A common way to address this problem is to convert strings to a standard format, like all lower-case, before performing the comparison. The next sections explains how. I will not address the more difficult problem, which is making the program realize that zebras are not fruit.

For the following questions, remember that in C++ 1 means true and 0 means false.