IF with string read by FGETCSV

Question

I have a problemi in using an IF statement with a string read from a file through fgetcsv command. The file start with Country (without quotes) in the first position so I put an IF statement at the beginning of my code in order to verify that the file is correct. The IF statement is:

if ($data[0]=="Country") {
…
} else { 
print $data[0] 
}

The IF statement fails but... on the screen I see the word Country. It means that the fgetcsv works well, but there are problems on string comparison. Can anyone tell me why the IF statement fails?

Thanks in advance for any help

giorgio

Check if it's really displaying just the characters `Country` or if there could be any whitespace characters (spaces, tabs, etc) in what it displays.... use `var_dump($data[0]);` instead of `print $data[0];` — Mark Baker, Apr 19 '16 at 08:22
I tried putting quotes before and after $data[0]: no spaces are present. I tried also with htmlentities to verify if HTML special characters are present but it seems like $data[0] contains just the word Country — Giorgio Torassa, Apr 19 '16 at 08:31
have u properly used ; for your code like u left in your else stmt — Nirpendra Patel, Apr 19 '16 at 08:35
Try using var_dump() as I suggested, and show us the output from that — Mark Baker, Apr 19 '16 at 08:36
The code is echo "Data[0]=".var_dump($data[0])" but on the screen I see string(10) "Country" "Data[0]=" — Giorgio Torassa, Apr 19 '16 at 09:00
So it's a 10-character string; and `Country` is only 7 characters, so there's three invisible (whitespace) characters in the string.... try doing `if (trim($data[0])=="Country")` — Mark Baker, Apr 19 '16 at 09:11
Try using a regex, just to check if it is invisible characters causing the issue: http://stackoverflow.com/a/22657781/608312 — Jake Lee, Apr 19 '16 at 09:18
Use something like a [string to hex convertor](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14674834/php-convert-string-to-hex-and-hex-to-string) to dump your $data[0] string as hex ASCII values so that we can see exactly what you're getting — Mark Baker, Apr 19 '16 at 09:21
Thanks to all!!! It's a BOM, bin2hex($data[0]) reports "efbbbf436f756e747279" and EFBBBF is the BOM for UTF-8. I never stop learning :-) — Giorgio Torassa, Apr 19 '16 at 09:32

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 19 '16 at 11:09

0

Try comparing like this:

if (strtolower(trim($data[0])) == 'country') {
  echo 'found';
} else { 
  print $data[0] 
}

answered Apr 19 '16 at 11:09

IF with string read by FGETCSV

1 Answers1