Question

Apparently, the below javascript prints TRUE.

var s = "hippo";
var t = "Hippo";
var test = (s > t);
document.write(test ? "TRUE" : "FALSE");​

What makes “hippo” greater than “Hippo”? The ASCII value for H is greater than the ASCII value of h.

What is the logic underlying javascript string comparisons?

http://jsfiddle.net/dUadG/1/

Answer 1

In dictionary ordering, we generally want lowercase to come after uppercase so that proper names show up first. I suppose that doesn’t have to be the case; that’s just the convention for English speakers AFAIK. “X Greater than Y” in strings means “X shows up in a dictionary after Y”. So this is not unexpected.