strtolower($a)==strtolower($b)!=match?

OK, i have a function that compares values and returns the results, regardless of case, ie: Interfacility Transfer = INTERFACILITY TRANSFER here is the function:

function fncResult ($expVal, $actVal)
{
    $negNulls=array("-5","-10","-15","-20","-25");
    if (!in_array($expVal, $negNulls))
    {
        if(strtolower($expVal)==strtolower($actVal))
        {
            echo "
            <td class='match' title='The values match.'>Match</td>
        </tr>";
        }
        else
        {
            echo "
                            <td class='notMatch'  title='The values do not match.'>Not Match<br />No Match</td>
                        </tr>";
        }
    }
    else
    {
        echo "
            <td class='null'  title='The value in the XML was a negative null.'>Negative Null</td>
        </tr>";
    }
}

It works about 99% of the time except when it comes to this:

//--Type of service requested
        echo "
            <tr>
                <td>E02_04</td>
                <td>Type of Service Requested</td>
                <td>36. &lt;Nature of Call&gt;</td>
                <td>$fldServReq</td>
                <td>".fncGrabNemsis("E02_04",$fldServReq,$local)."</td>
                <td>".fncIsSet($CZ_E02_04[1])."</td>";
        fncResult(fncGrabNemsis("E02_04",$fldServReq,$local),fncIsSet($CZ_E02_04[1]));

Although it looks more开发者_运维问答 complicated, it really is just a strtolower($expVal)==strtolower($actVal), comparison. When I echo the values being compared, I get: "interfacility transfer" and "interfacility transfer" and "No Match"... WTF? Could it be because the first value is coming from a XML (UTF-8) and the second is from a DB (?) I have no idea what to do and am incredibly frustrated since this a simple task. Thanks for any help!

Is there any trailing whitespace on your strings? Perhaps nesting a trim() along with a strtolower() would clear that up? If you're looking at this in HTML output, take a look at the source and make sure there's not an HTML entity in there messing it up (i.e. "interfacility transfer" and "interfacility transfer" are not the same, but may look the same rendered in HTML).

The final option is to "upgrade" to the mb_strtolower and see if it is an encoding issue.

Print out the bytes of expval and actval (with urlencode, for example). There are a lot of different characters that look exactly the same (for example, normal space and non-breaking space, or c, es and roman 100).