PHP cURL response error when comparing in if statement - php

Question

Ok, this literally makes no sense...
I am using this function to call an API
function get_web_page($url) {
$options = array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true, // return web page
CURLOPT_HEADER => false, // don't return headers
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true, // follow redirects
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10, // stop after 10 redirects
CURLOPT_ENCODING => "", // handle compressed
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "API", // name of client
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => true, // set referrer on redirect
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 120, // time-out on connect
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 120, // time-out on response
);
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$content = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $content;
}
Which works find if i do something like this
$exampleResponse = get_web_page("https://example.com/index.php?example=1");
echo $exampleResponse;
But what makes absolutely no sense (to me) is that trying to compare the response in a if statement DOES NOT WORK! Here is an example (assume the API response is "example")
$exampleResponse = get_web_page("https://example.com/index.php?example=1");
if($exampleResponse == "example")
{
echo "ok";
}
This will not work and ok will NOT be echoed even though the API responded with "example". This is very confusing to me, if anyone has any idea why this may be occurring please let me know - thanks for your time.