if statement with string comparison

Question

Code Snippet:

String a;

const int red_led_pin = 13;

void setup() 
{
  Serial.begin(115200);
  Serial.println("Hello, ESP32-S2!");
  pinMode(red_led_pin, OUTPUT); 
}

void loop() {

    while (Serial.available()) 
    {
        a = Serial.readString();// read the incoming data as string
        Serial.print(" First: ");
        Serial.println(a);
    

        if (a.equals("on"))
        {
          Serial.println("LED ON");
          digitalWrite(red_led_pin, HIGH);

        }


        else  if (a == "off" || a == "OFF")
        {
          Serial.println("LED OFF");
          digitalWrite(red_led_pin, LOW);
        }

        Serial.print("Second: ");
        Serial.println(a);
    }
}

Serial.print out:

Circuitry:

Issue:

The code can't capture the on string or any other string (on, off or OFF) that I pass. However it does pick it up and Serial.print it.

What is going wrong?

Things I have tried:

I have tried as a comparison:

if (a.equals("on")){<>}
if (a == "on")){<>}
if (a.equalsIgnoreCase("on")){<>}

Due Diligence / Prior Research:

What line ending have you set in the Serial Monitor? My guess is, that the Serial Monitor sends a line ending after the actual data, which gets included by Serial.readString(), so that the string doesn't equal "on", but for example `"on\n". — chrisl
– chrisl, Commented Mar 1, 2023 at 8:49
@chrisl and all. this question is asked often. let's use this Q&A pair as canonical for future duplicates — Juraj
– Juraj ♦, Commented Mar 1, 2023 at 9:54
I'm going to be cheeky and ask for some up votes from the community:) — 3kstc
– 3kstc, Commented Mar 3, 2023 at 2:21

chrisl · Accepted Answer · 2023-03-01 09:01:03Z

Your problem is the line ending. The Serial Monitor has an option to send a line ending after the data, that you input. This line ending can be different depending on this setting, though mostly in the Arduino world a simple newline character '\n' is used.

This line ending will be in your string, when using Serial.readString(), so the string is not equal to "on", but to something like "on\n".

You can solve this issue by two ways:

Set the Serial Monitor to no line ending.
Or better: Use something like Serial.readStringUntil() and pass the line ending character to it as parameter (for example Serial.readStringUntil('\n')). This will read from the Serial interface until the specified character is reached. The specified character will be discarded and you are left with only the data, which you can then do comparisons on. This also has the advantage, that your code will react much faster, since it doesn't wait for 1s for new data (as long as you actually send the needed line ending).

if there is a \r too, trim() can help. but as always it is better not to use String — Juraj
– Juraj ♦, Commented Mar 1, 2023 at 9:52

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