What are the best practices for comparing strings in PHP to avoid common issues like whitespace discrepancies?

When comparing strings in PHP, it's important to consider common issues like whitespace discrepancies. To avoid this problem, you can use functions like trim() to remove leading and trailing whitespace before comparing the strings. This ensures that the strings are compared without any whitespace discrepancies affecting the result.

$string1 = "  Hello";
$string2 = "Hello  ";

if (trim($string1) === trim($string2)) {
    echo "The strings are equal";
} else {
    echo "The strings are not equal";
}