What are some best practices for comparing strings in PHP to avoid unexpected results?

When comparing strings in PHP, it is important to be aware of potential issues due to character encoding, case sensitivity, and whitespace. To avoid unexpected results, it is recommended to normalize strings using functions like `mb_strtolower()` for case-insensitive comparison, `trim()` for removing whitespace, and `mb_convert_encoding()` for handling different character encodings. 

// Example of comparing two strings in a case-insensitive and whitespace-trimmed manner
$string1 = "Hello World";
$string2 = "hello world ";

$normalizedString1 = mb_strtolower(trim($string1));
$normalizedString2 = mb_strtolower(trim($string2));

if ($normalizedString1 === $normalizedString2) {
    echo "The strings are equal.";
} else {
    echo "The strings are not equal.";
}

Keywords

strcmp strcasecmp mb_strtolower Unicode collation

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