What are the potential pitfalls of using string variables in conditional statements in PHP scripts?

Using string variables in conditional statements in PHP scripts can lead to unexpected behavior due to case sensitivity or whitespace issues. To avoid this, it's recommended to normalize the strings by trimming whitespace and converting them to lowercase before performing the comparison. 

// Example of normalizing string variables before using them in a conditional statement
$string1 = "Hello World";
$string2 = "hello world";

// Normalize strings by trimming whitespace and converting to lowercase
$normalizedString1 = strtolower(trim($string1));
$normalizedString2 = strtolower(trim($string2));

// Perform comparison using normalized strings
if ($normalizedString1 === $normalizedString2) {
    echo "Strings are equal";
} else {
    echo "Strings are not equal";
}

Keywords

string variables conditional statements PHP scripts type coercion comparison operators

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