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3.6.2.1 Exact Pattern Matching

Exact matching tests for a string entirely matching a given pattern. You specify exact matching by using the == equality relational with one pattern operand and one string operand (order irrelevant). For example,

         "foo" == /foo|bar/

yields true, while

         /foo|bar/ == "foobar"

yields false. The != operator is the negation of the == operator, just as when comparing strings or numerics.

Note that for exact matching, the ^ (anchor to beginning-of-line) and $ (anchor to end-of-line) regular expression operators are redundant: since the match is exact, every pattern is implicitly anchored to the beginning and end of the line.