strtolower($a)==strtolower($b)!=match?

Question

OK, i have a function that compares values and returns the results, regardless of case, ie: Interfacility Transfer = INTERFACILITY TRANSFER here is the function:

function fncResult ($expVal, $actVal)
{
    $negNulls=array("-5","-10","-15","-20","-25");
    if (!in_array($expVal, $negNulls))
    {
        if(strtolower($expVal)==strtolower($actVal))
        {
            echo "
            <td class='match' title='The values match.'>Match</td>
        </tr>";
        }
        else
        {
            echo "
                            <td class='notMatch'  title='The values do not match.'>Not Match<br />No Match</td>
                        </tr>";
        }
    }
    else
    {
        echo "
            <td class='null'  title='The value in the XML was a negative null.'>Negative Null</td>
        </tr>";
    }
}

It works about 99% of the time except when it comes to this:

//--Type of service requested
        echo "
            <tr>
                <td>E02_04</td>
                <td>Type of Service Requested</td>
                <td>36. &lt;Nature of Call&gt;</td>
                <td>$fldServReq</td>
                <td>".fncGrabNemsis("E02_04",$fldServReq,$local)."</td>
                <td>".fncIsSet($CZ_E02_04[1])."</td>";
        fncResult(fncGrabNemsis("E02_04",$fldServReq,$local),fncIsSet($CZ_E02_04[1]));

Although it looks more complicated, it really is just a strtolower($expVal)==strtolower($actVal), comparison. When I echo the values being compared, I get: "interfacility transfer" and "interfacility transfer" and "No Match"... WTF? Could it be because the first value is coming from a XML (UTF-8) and the second is from a DB (?) I have no idea what to do and am incredibly frustrated since this a simple task. Thanks for any help!

Why don't you just use [strcasecmp](http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/function.strcasecmp.php)? — John Parker, Feb 07 '11 at 21:10
There might be whitespaces. `var_dump` and check if their lengths are equal, or try `trim` on the input first. — netcoder, Feb 07 '11 at 21:16
All this code is useless without seeing the data being supplied to it. It seems very likely that you are having trouble with character encoding. — user229044, Feb 07 '11 at 21:17
This user may have encountered a similar problem: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3636559/strange-utf8-string-comparison/3636631#3636631 . Likewise, this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1089966/utf8-filenames-in-php-and-different-unicode-encodings/1934029#1934029 . In other words, the same Unicode character can be represented by different sequences of bytes. Can you post a *hex* dump of the strings? — Piskvor left the building, Feb 07 '11 at 21:20

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 07 '11 at 21:17

Is there any trailing whitespace on your strings? Perhaps nesting a trim() along with a strtolower() would clear that up? If you're looking at this in HTML output, take a look at the source and make sure there's not an HTML entity in there messing it up (i.e. "interfacility transfer" and "interfacility transfer" are not the same, but may look the same rendered in HTML).

The final option is to "upgrade" to the mb_strtolower and see if it is an encoding issue.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 07 '11 at 21:26

0

Print out the bytes of expval and actval (with urlencode, for example). There are a lot of different characters that look exactly the same (for example, normal space and non-breaking space, or c, es and roman 100).

answered Feb 07 '11 at 21:26

Tgr

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strtolower($a)==strtolower($b)!=match?

2 Answers2