Many thanks PaulS. I suppose you could change the order of commands in void serialEvent() so the newline doesn't get appended to inputString, but presume the author had reasons for not doing that. A bit of browsing turns up method trim() which does the job nicely. Here's my corrected and tested version, with "chris" declared as though it were a constant:
/*
Serial Event example, with addition by crlMIDI
When new serial data arrives, this sketch adds it to a String.
When a newline is received, the loop prints the string and
clears it.
A good test for this is to try it with a GPS receiver
that sends out NMEA 0183 sentences.
Created 9 May 2011
by Tom Igoe
This example code is in the public domain.
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/SerialEvent
*/
String inputString = ""; // a string to hold incoming data
boolean stringComplete = false; // whether the string is complete
// the string we are going to compare inputString with
String myString1 = "chris";
void setup() {
// initialize serial:
Serial.begin(9600);
// reserve 200 bytes for the inputString:
inputString.reserve(200);
}
void loop() {
// print the string when a newline arrives:
if (stringComplete) {
checkMystring();
Serial.println(inputString);
// clear the string:
inputString = "";
stringComplete = false;
}
}
void checkMystring() {
// trim is a method of the String class that removes whitespace
// including Newline and Carrriage return
inputString.trim();
// either of the following 2 commands is OK:
if (inputString == myString1)
// if (inputString.equalsIgnoreCase(myString1))
{Serial.println("Matches"); }
else {Serial.println("Match not found"); }
}
/*
SerialEvent occurs whenever a new data comes in the
hardware serial RX. This routine is run between each
time loop() runs, so using delay inside loop can delay
response. Multiple bytes of data may be available.
*/
void serialEvent() {
while (Serial.available()) {
// get the new byte:
char inChar = (char)Serial.read();
// add it to the inputString:
inputString += inChar;
// if the incoming character is a newline, set a flag
// so the main loop can do something about it:
if (inChar == '\n') {
stringComplete = true;
}
}
}