in reply to 'eq' matching not comprehensive

Did you check the encoding of the webpage and the encoding used in the database? If they are not the same, both strings may look the same on screen, but are actually quite different code-wise.

A cheap trick is to use Text::Unidecode to transliterate both the database-string and the web-string to US-ASCII and then compare these. That should get you out of trouble with most "funny" characters and their internal representations.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom