PHP string comparison between two different types of encoding

Question

I am attempting to match a string I know to a web page title in php.

I have the following string:

ℛobinhood

I have a page title that looks like this:

ℛobinhood

but is actually encoded like this if I look at the <title> element:

ℛobinhood

I'm not sure how to compare these two strings. How do I either convert the ℛ to ℛ or the other way so that I can do a proper comparison?

Answer 1

Use the multibyte string functions:

• mb_convert_encoding() to convert both versions to something sane (UTF8, internal encoding)
• mb_strstr() to do the comparison

mb_* will have an encoding for HTML entities and (most likely) whatever encoding your string is in.

Answer 2

You can use htmlentites ( http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php ) to convert to the entity version.