Spring SpEL - Relational Operators

SpEL expression supports relational operators like <, >, equals etc. It also support instance of and matches operators.

Following example shows the various use cases.

Example - Usage of Relational Operators in SpEL

Let's update the project created in Spring SpEL - Create Project chapter. We're updating following file −

• MainApp.java − Main application to run and test.

MainApp.java

Here is the content of MainApp.java file −

package com.tutorialspoint;

import java.text.ParseException;

import org.springframework.expression.ExpressionParser;
import org.springframework.expression.spel.standard.SpelExpressionParser;

public class MainApp {
   public static void main(String[] args) throws ParseException {
      ExpressionParser parser = new SpelExpressionParser();

      // evaluates to true
      boolean result = parser.parseExpression("2 == 2").getValue(Boolean.class);
      System.out.println(result);

      // evaluates to false
      result = parser.parseExpression("2 < -5.0").getValue(Boolean.class);
      System.out.println(result);

      // evaluates to true
      result = parser.parseExpression("'black' < 'block'").getValue(Boolean.class);
      System.out.println(result);

      // evaluates to false
      result = parser.parseExpression("'xyz' instanceof T(int)").getValue(Boolean.class);
      System.out.println(result);

      // evaluates to false
      result = parser.parseExpression("'5.0067' matches '^-?\\d+(\\.\\d{2})?$'").getValue(Boolean.class);
      System.out.println(result);
   }
}

Output

Once you are done creating the source and bean configuration files, let us run the application. If everything is fine with your application, it will print the following message −

true
false
true
false
false