When working with strings in PHP, what are some best practices to ensure accurate comparisons, especially when dealing with multibyte characters?

When working with strings in PHP, especially when dealing with multibyte characters, it is important to use the appropriate functions for accurate comparisons. One common issue is using functions like `strcmp()` or `==` for multibyte strings, which may not give correct results. To ensure accurate comparisons, it is recommended to use multibyte string functions like `mb_strtolower()` or `mb_strcasecmp()`. 

$string1 = "Café";
$string2 = "café";

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

Keywords

multibyte characters string comparison mbstring extension mb_strtolower Unicode normalization

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