Comparing PHP strings between two different types of coding

Question

I am trying to match a string that I know with the title of a webpage in php.

I have the following line:

ℛobinhood

I have a page title that looks like this:

ℛobinhood

but actually encoded this way if I look at the <title> element:

 ℛobinhood 

I am not sure how to compare these two lines. How do I convert ℛ to ℛ or the other way so that I can make the right comparison?

Answer 1

You can use htmlentites ( http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php ) to convert to an entity version.

Answer 2

Use multibyte string functions:

• mb_convert_encoding () to convert both versions to something normal (UTF8, internal encoding)
• mb_strstr () to do a comparison

mb_ * will have an encoding for HTML entities and (most likely), no matter what encoding your string is in.