utterly weird behavior in basic string comparison

Question

this doesn't make any sense to me. must be wrong or painfully obvious.

after slicing and dicing, i got 2 vars with the following values in vb.net:

strTag = "&lt;#<span class=SpellE>vermittler_person_Name</span>&gt;"
tmp    = "&lt;#<span class=SpellE>vermittler_person_Name</span>&gt;"

comparing the vars gives a false:

strTag = tmp ' ==> false

comparing the values directly right there gives a true:

"&lt;#<span class=SpellE>vermittler_person_Name</span>&gt;" = "&lt;#<span class=SpellE>vermittler_person_Name</span>&gt;" ' ==> true

both are strings, i tried all kinds of stuff: string.compare, string.equals, also regex etc. etc. everything works perfect with all the other strings with simlilar structure, just not and only not with

"vermittler_person_Name"

in the middle... any ideas?

Answer 1

I strongly suspect that although the two displayed strings were equal, the internal data wasn't equal. There could be any number of non-printing characters in there.

If you're able to reproduce this, I suggest you look at the Unicode value of each character of the offending strings. If I'm right, we won't be able to reproduce this via an SO post which only contains the visible characters, for obvious reasons.

Answer 2

you can check the lengths of the two strings to see if they're the same, or convert both of them to the same case (upper or lower) to see if that's causing the difference