Strange PHP string compare effect, could this be made nicer? - php

Question

I've updated a website and found an annoying problem in my pages
I resolved it, but i'm not realy convinced it should look like this.
To me i'm not an PHP expert its strange behaviour could someone explain me whats going on.
I had this code:
if($Menu == "index"){
{if ($Language == "UK"){echo "<td><h1>Welcome</h1>";}
{if ($Language == "NL"){echo "<td><h1>Welkom </h1>";}
}
else
// if $menu was not index it displayed a hyperlink to Welcome page
The string thing here that while the checking for language worked fine.
The comparison for $Menu did not work, even if it contained the word index
As the whole page was generated on the fly and some string operations where done before
I assumed that maybe, despite i also tested it with
echo "dump Menu variable " . $Menu
Which resulted in jut displaying the word index on the page. So maybe there would go something wrong in string types or something like that
So i experimented with
if($Menu === "index")
No luck
Well i finally solved it like this
if (strpos($Menu,'index' !==false)
Is that really the way it should be done???, I don't feel really comfortable with it.
As to me its strange that for $Language it just works as it should (in my opinion).
Is there is some type problem here, or maybe unwanted endings \n could i perhaps ehm normalize the string to do a content of readable string comparions or, a different type of equal operator. As it feels to me as $Menu could be handled more easily. Maybe a reformat or but i'm not sure here.

Answer 1

Looks indeed like your index-String is containing whitespaces, instead of strpos you could use trim( $Menu ) to get rid of them.
But the best would be to prevent their occurence. You could try echo "dump Menu variable |" . $Menu ."|"; or just var_dump( $Menu ) to identify the additional characters.
Maybe you could post, your code-segment where $Menu is filled.
(sorry can't just comment)

Answer 2

You can try something like this
$Menu = trim($Menu);
$Language = trim($Language);
$langAllowed = ["UK", "NL"]; // zero element is default;
if(!in_array($Language, $langAllowed )) $Language = $langAllowed[0];
$menuLocales=[
"index" => [
"UK"=>"Welcome",
"NL"=>"Welkom "
],
"default"=>[
"UK"=>"Welcome default (no index)",
"NL"=>"Welkom default (no index)"
]
];
$MenuIndex = isset($menuLocales[ $Menu ]) ? $Menu : "default";
echo "<td><h1>".$menuLocales[ $MenuIndex ][ $Language ]."</h1>";