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The Java language provides many different ways to perform string comparisons.
The equals method returns true if two strings have the same text, false otherwise.
The method s1.compareTo(s2) returns a negative value if s1 precedes s2, zero if s1 is equal to s2, and a positive value otherwise.

The example shows how to use the equals and compareTo methods: 

public class CompareStringsTest
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    String c1 = "Atene";
    String c2 = "Zurich";

    String n1 = "Albert";
    String n2 = "Albert";
	
	System.out.println("c1 = "+c1);
	System.out.println("c2 = "+c2);
	System.out.println("n1 = " + n1);
	System.out.println("n2 = " + n2);
	System.out.println("------------------------------------------");  
    System.out.println("c1.compareTo(c2) = " + c1.compareTo(c2));
    System.out.println("c2.compareTo(c1) = " + c2.compareTo(c1));
    System.out.println("c1.equals(c2) = " + c1.equals(c2));
	System.out.println();
    System.out.println("n1.compareTo(n2) = " + n1.compareTo(n2));
    System.out.println("n1.equals(n2) = " + n1.equals(n2));
	System.out.println();
    System.out.println("n1.compareTo(c1) = " + n1.compareTo(c1));
    System.out.println("n1.equals(c1) = " + n1.equals(c1));
  }
}

This is the result you get:

c1 = Atene
c2 = Zurich
n1 = Albert
n2 = Albert
------------------------------------------
c1.compareTo(c2) = -25
c2.compareTo(c1) = 25
c1.equals(c2) = false

n1.compareTo(n2) = 0
n1.equals(n2) = true

n1.compareTo(c1) = -8
n1.equals(c1) = false