Not to claim that I know anything about PHP (I don't), but I have dim memories of C (and I just took a look at your links), and I will indulge in one smart-ass nit-pick: if you're confusing strcmp and strncmp, you may be in for a nasty surprise... that 'n' isn't part "string", it's an integer argument to the function telling it how many characters are significant for purposes of this comparison (that is, strncmp("bar","baz",2) indicates no difference).