Java Programming/Boolean expressions

Boolean values are values that evaluate to either or, and are represented by the  data type. Boolean expressions are very similar to mathematical expressions, but instead of using mathematical operators such as "+" or "-", you use comparative or boolean operators such as "==" or "!".

Comparative operators
Java has several operators that can be used to compare variables. For example, how would you tell if one variable has a greater value than another? The answer: use the "greater-than" operator.

Here is a list of the comparative operators in Java:


 * : Greater than
 * : Less than
 * : Greater than or equal to
 * : Less than or equal to
 * : Equal to
 * : Not equal to

To see how these operators are used, look at this example:

Comparative operators can be used on any primitive types (except ), but only the "equals" and "does not equal" operators work on objects. This is because the less-than/greater-than operators cannot be applied to objects, but the equivalency operators can.

Boolean operators
The Java boolean operators are based on the operations of the boolean algebra. The boolean operators operate directly on boolean values.

Here is a list of four common boolean operators in Java:


 * : Boolean NOT
 * : Boolean AND
 * : Boolean inclusive OR
 * : Boolean exclusive XOR

The boolean NOT operator ("!") inverts the value of a boolean expression. The boolean AND operator ("&&") will result in true if and only if the values on both sides of the operator are true. The boolean inclusive OR operator ("||") will result in true if either or both of the values on the sides of the operator is true. The boolean exclusive XOR operator ("^") will result in true if one and only one of the values on the sides of the operator is true.

To show how these operators are used, here is an example:

Here are the truth tables for the boolean operators:


 * For help on simplifying complex logic, see De Morgan's laws.

In Java, boolean logic has a useful property called short circuiting. This means that expressions will only be evaluated as far as necessary. In the expression, if a is false, then b will not be evaluated because the expression will be false no matter what. Here is an example that shows that the second expression is not automatically checked:

To disable this property, you can use  instead of   and   instead of   but it's not recommended.


 * For the bitwise operations on  and , see Arithmetic expressions.