Relational Operations

A relational operation applies a relational operator or relational function to a pair of operands and returns a logical value.

Relational operations are often combined with Matlab Logical Operations to form complex conditional expressions.

Element-Wise Relational Operations

All operands must be ordinary arrays—not cell or structure arrays
- Fully supported types: single, double, int8, int16, int32, int64, uint8, uint16, uint32, uint64, logical, char, string, categorical, datetime, duration
Operand sizes must be compatible
- For arrays of the same size, comparison is element-wise at matching indices, returning a logical array of the same size
- When one operand is a scalar, it is compared against every element of the other
For characters, the comparison is lexicographic
For complex numbers
- The first two relational operations (==, ~=) compare both real and imaginary parts
- The remaining four operations compare only the real part
The constant Inf equals Inf
The constant NaN is unequal to any value, including itself
For floating-point values, the storage format imposes a relative error, so it is best not to test equality of two floats directly. Instead, use one of the last four comparisons to bound the value within a tolerance interval that meets your needs
For integer-valued data—whether of class double, an integer class, logical, or character (code point)—comparisons can be made in the usual way

The functions isequal and isequaln compare any two values and return a single logical value indicating whether they are identical.

The exact definition of “identical” is given in Matlab Functions - isequal
isequaln differs from isequal only in that indeterminate elements such as NaN are treated as equal to themselves