Compare encoded string to decoded string in PHP?-CodePudding

I have two same strings but one is having HTML entities and the other is its equivalent character.

$s1 = "&lsquo;Dragon&rsquo;";
$s2 = "'Dragon'";

Is there any way I can detect that both strings are the same? I know that strcmp can not be used here and there is no mb_ function for comparing in PHP. Here is what I did but it is not working.

$coll = collator_create( 'en_US' );
$res  = collator_compare( $coll, html_entity_decode($s1), $s2 );

if ($res === false) {
    echo collator_get_error_message( $coll );
} else if( $res > 0 ) {
    echo "s1 is greater than s2\n";
} else if( $res < 0 ) {
    echo "s1 is less than s2\n";
} else {
    echo "s1 is equal to s2\n";
}

CodePudding user response：

@saurabh, in your case you are dealing with the left single quote special character. You can convert this to it's character by using the html_entity_decode method:

$s1 = html_entity_decode($s1) // ‘Dragon’

Now you can compare the strings like you normally would do: $s1 == $s2

But since your $s2 doesn't have the left single quote but the apostrophe, your check will return false. So make sure the characters are the same.

$s1 = html_entity_decode("&lsquo;Dragon&rsquo;"); // ‘Dragon’
$s2 = "'Dragon'"; // 'Dragon'

// false because ‘ is not the same as '
return $s1 == $s2; // false