Problems comparing strings.

Helleshoj

If I compare a variable which contains a string (retrieved from FileMaker ) with a corresponding string in the Post array, some times these two strings are seen as different.
As soon as there are other characters in the string then A-Z and 1-9 or the most usual punctuation, PHP seems to see the strings as different. I have used a simple '!== campare, and I have used strcmp and strcoll, but all three give the same result. Most prolematic is, that these strings from time to time will contain aring-, oslash- and aelig-characters.
How can I compare these strings in a way that only is true, when the strings are not visibly identical?

laserlight

As soon as there are other characters in the string then A-Z and 1-9 or the most usual punctuation, PHP seems to see the strings as different.

That makes sense.

How can I compare these strings in a way that only is true, when the strings are not visibly identical?

What is your notion of string equality?
Is "hello" equal to "world"? They can be, if your notion of equality is equality of sequence length.

barand

It's possible one of your strings contains trailing spaces or other whitespace characters

$a = "Hello";
$b = "Hello ";

echo ($a == $b) ? 'Yes' : 'No';         // --> No

Helleshoj

I get one string from a form on the page. This form contains a large number of textfields and pop-ups to set the data in the database. The string will either contain a sentence in Danish, or a combination of characters including numbers etc. Because it is in Danish, the letters Æ,Ø,Å will occasionally be present.
The next string is the corresponding data in the database (FileMaker), which is taken from the query using FX. When I use "print_r" to display the data both strings will look alinke, if there has not been any change, since the data in the form is from that same database.
I make a simple compare "if (varX!==varY)" or "if (strcmp(varX, varY)!=='0')". Both give the result I need as long as the sentence does not contain Æ,Ø or Å. (& and signs like that seem give the same problem).

Helleshoj

I think I found out, where things go wrong... The text From FileMaker comes as XML and is parsed in FX. The result writes the foreign characters with #, while the html eqivalents in the page are written like "æ" So there is a difference.