Compare nested foreach variables in php without globals?

I have multiple foreach's parsing data that I need to compare with each other. For instance:

foreach ($xml_string->xpath('//location') as $character) {

  $xml_name = $character->earthname;

  $compare_remote = strtolower(preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]/", "", $xml_name));

}

foreach ( $whatever as $key => $value ) {

 foreach ($value as $pkey){

   $value_name = $pkey["spacename"];

   $compare_local = strtolower(preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/", '', $value_name));

 }
}

How can I loop through both sets of foreach to compare all the values in 开发者_如何学编程$compare_remote with the values in $compare_local , I will probably be using levenshtein(), but for the sake of this example anything will do.

    foreach ($xml_string->xpath('//location') as $character) {

      $xml_name = $character->earthname;

      $compare_remote = strtolower(preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]/", "", $xml_name));

       foreach ( $whatever as $key => $value ) {

          foreach ($value as $pkey){

              $value_name = $pkey["spacename"];

              $compare_local = strtolower(preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/", '', $value_name));

                if( $compare_remote==$compare_local) echo "match";
          }
        }

 }

Without knowing what it is your comparing, you could use an associative array outside both loops as key / value lookups. If there is a common key then you can operate on the same values that were evaluated by both loops. Ideally I know you want to iterate over both at the same time, but this is a possibility that results in one evaluated set of data. Unique keys are preserved.

$compare[];

foreach ($xml_string->xpath('//location') as $character) {

  $xml_name = $character->earthname;

  $compare[strtolower(preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]/", "", $xml_name))];

}

foreach ( $whatever as $key => $value ) {

 foreach ($value as $pkey){

   $value_name = $pkey["spacename"];

   $compare[strtolower(preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/", '', $value_name))];

 }
}