How to use comparison operators like >, =, < on BigDecimal

Solution 1:

To be short:

firstBigDecimal.compareTo(secondBigDecimal) < 0 // "<"
firstBigDecimal.compareTo(secondBigDecimal) > 0 // ">"    
firstBigDecimal.compareTo(secondBigDecimal) == 0 // "=="  
firstBigDecimal.compareTo(secondBigDecimal) >= 0 // ">="    

Solution 2:

Every object of the Class BigDecimal has a method compareTo you can use to compare it to another BigDecimal. The result of compareTo is then compared > 0, == 0 or < 0 depending on what you need. Read the documentation and you will find out.

The operators ==, <, > and so on can only be used on primitive data types like int, long, double or their wrapper classes like Integerand Double.

From the documentation of compareTo:

Compares this BigDecimal with the specified BigDecimal.

Two BigDecimal objects that are equal in value but have a different scale (like 2.0 and 2.00) are considered equal by this method. This method is provided in preference to individual methods for each of the six boolean comparison operators (<, ==, >, >=, !=, <=). The suggested idiom for performing these comparisons is: (x.compareTo(y) <op> 0), where <op> is one of the six comparison operators.

Returns: -1, 0, or 1 as this BigDecimal is numerically less than, equal to, or greater than val.