NSOrderedSame not YES even though values in NSLog are equal

Question

I have a simple but strange problem. I compare to strings, (taken from different xmls), to find out if they match. If i trace the variables via NSLog, they LOOK the same, but obviously are not. So i guess it's got to do something with its encodings, but i don't know what. Anyone help?

I found out that the strings are not of the same length, but i can't find whitespaces:

Code:

NSString* value1 = [mymovieId stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@" " withString:@""];
NSString* value2 = [movieId stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@" " withString:@""];

NSLog(@"%@ == %@", mymovieId, movieId);
NSLog(@"%i / %i", value1.length, value2.length);

if ([value1 compare:value2] == NSOrderedSame) {
    NSLog(@"YES!");
} else {
    NSLog(@"NO!");
}

result:

2012-01-17 20:40:06.044 Appname[6307:f803] 75175343 == 75175343
2012-01-17 20:40:06.044 Appname[6307:f803] 9 / 8
2012-01-17 20:40:06.045 Appname[6307:f803] NO!

Certainly this problem onyl exists due to my rawdata, but I can't upload my whole project here, so i hope someone knows an answer anyway.

Thanx Wolfgang

Answer 1

Try logging the strings as data:

NSLog(@"mymovieId: %@", [mymovieId dataUsingEncoding:NSUnicodeStringEncoding]);
NSLog(@"movieId: %@", [movieId dataUsingEncoding:NSUnicodeStringEncoding]);

That will print hex dumps of the strings, making it possible to see unprintable characters.

From your comment it looks like one of your strings starts with a newline. Try this:

movieId = [movieId stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];
mymovieId = [mymovieId stringByTrimmingCharactersInSet:[NSCharacterSet whitespaceAndNewlineCharacterSet]];

Answer 2

try using

[NSString compare: options: range:]

(i.e. include a range of one of the strings).

My guess is that you have some white space at the end of your string (coming from one of the XML results). Checking the length of those two strings will show you for certain.