Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress 4GL Handbook

Comparison operators

The equal sign is just one of a number of comparison operators you can use in 4GL expressions. Table 2–1 provides a complete list.

Table 2–1: Comparison operators

Keyword	Symbol	Explanation
EQ	=	Equal to.
NE	<>	Not equal to.
GT	>	Greater than.
LT	<	Less than.
GE	>=	Greater than or equal to.
LE	<=	Less than or equal to.
BEGINS	Not applicable	A character value that begins with this substring.
MATCHES	Not applicable	A character value that matches this substring, which can include wild card characters. The expression you use to the right of the MATCHES keyword can contain the wild card characters: An asterisk (*) represents one or more missing characters. A period (.) represents exactly one missing character.
CONTAINS	Not applicable	A database text field that has a special kind of index called a WORD-INDEX. The WORD-INDEX indexes all the words in a field’s text strings, for all the records of the table, allowing you to locate individual words or associated words in the database records, much as you do when you use an Internet search engine to locate text in documents on the Web.