Python 3 - Two identical strings are not matching through ==

Question

I have a string pulled from an excel spreadsheet, call it x. When using the print statement it prints the word PLANT

print(x)
PLANT

When I do the following:

if x == 'PLANT':
    print('YES')
else:
    print('NO')

It always prints NO.

I believe this is caused by the == checking something more fundamental than just the surface string. I tried to investigate further by using the ascii command, but this does not show any difference either.

ascii(x)

Are there any other commands I could try to distinguish x from PLANT and understand why they are not matching?

Things tested

repr(x)
'PLANT'

type(x)
<class 'str'>

ascii(x)
'PLANT'

Difference found:

id(x)
30805824

id('PLANT')
28515008

Have you looked at `repr(x)`? How was it *"pulled from an excel spreadsheet"*; are you sure it's a string rather than some special cell representation? — jonrsharpe, Jul 01 '15 at 16:02
Can you show us more code (example from the moment x is read from spreadsheet and this comparison — Anand S Kumar, Jul 01 '15 at 16:11
you'd better upload your excel file and all your code for others to test — zhangxaochen, Jul 01 '15 at 16:15
There is not enough information here. Based on what you're saying the equality should pass. Instead of `else: print('NO')`, try `else: print('x')` and see if something is modifying the value along the way. — MrAlexBailey, Jul 01 '15 at 16:16
x and 'PLANT' has the same len, type, and repr but different id. — Phoenix, Jul 01 '15 at 16:25
Strings aren't compared on identity, though. There is something seriously wrong here. — jonrsharpe, Jul 02 '15 at 06:46

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 01 '15 at 16:04

2

There may be a chance of getting spaces around the letters. So it's better to do stripping the space characters before checking the condition.

if x.strip() == 'PLANT':

answered Jul 01 '15 at 16:04

Avinash Raj

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what's the output of `[ord(i) for i in x]` ? – Avinash Raj Jul 01 '15 at 16:11
[ord(i) for i in x] returns [80, 76, 65, 78, 84]. [ord(i) for i in 'PLANT] returns [80, 76, 65, 78, 84] – Phoenix Jul 01 '15 at 16:29
Oh, i can't able to reproduce your problem. – Avinash Raj Jul 01 '15 at 16:32

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 01 '15 at 16:04

1

try this

x.strip() == 'PLANT':

answered Jul 01 '15 at 16:04

bigC5012

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 14 '23 at 04:45

I ran into similar issue, '\u00a0' can considered as space, if you read strings from a file, the chances are characters seem identical but completely different behind the scene.

solving this issue is not that much of a pain, however if you have this problem in your database, it might be difficult to look it up.

str1 = "Concrete Shear Walls"
str2 = "Concrete\u00a0Shear\u00a0Walls" # these two are identical on the surface
# Replace all non-breaking space characters with regular space characters
str2 = str2.replace('\u00a0', ' ')

if str1 == str2:
    print("The strings are equal.")
else:
    print("The strings are not equal.")

I hope this work for you.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 20 '19 at 15:42

I ran into this same issue and found that the value I had read from a file was NUL terminated ('\0') whereas the python string i was comparing against was not.

Rather than just calling strip which will remove spaces, call strip with the specific character you are attempting to remove.

if x.strip('\0') == "PLANT":
     print("match")

I found my issue using

print([ord(i) for i in x])

as suggested by Avinash Raj.

I realize this didn't seem to work for the original poster but since this solved a very similar problem I was facing I wanted to post here in case it helps others.

Python 3 - Two identical strings are not matching through ==

4 Answers4