comparing code in Associative Arrays to hard coded values - php

Question

I have a text file with the following values which would be used as a username and password
root=>user
roots=>password
blabla=>moonbeam
help=>me
Code for a function validateUser in a file validateUser.php
function validateUser($username, $password)
{
$filename = 'userCreds.txt';
$file = fopen($filename, "r");
if($file==false)
{
echo"Error opening file";
exit();
}
$i=0;
static $Credentials = array();
foreach (file($filename) as $line)
{
list($key,$value) = explode("=>",$line,2) + array(NULL,NULL);
if($value !== NULL)
{
$Credentials[$key] = $value;
}
}
print_r($Credentials);
echo "<br>";
//static $Credentials = array("root"=>"user","rtam"=>"password","q"=>"continuum");
if(array_key_exists($username, $Credentials))
{
echo "$Credentials[$username] <br>";
echo "$password <br>";
if($Credentials[$username] == $password)
{
return TRUE;
}
else
{
echo $Credentials[$username]," is not equal to ",$password,"<br>";
return FALSE;
}
}
else return FALSE;
}
Code for the main file:
<?php
include_once "validateUser.php";
$username = "root";
$password = "user";
if(validateUser($username,$password))
{
echo "<h2>Welcome! <br></h2>";
}
else
{
echo "Try again <br>";
}
?>
The values for $username and password are hardcoded from the beginning for testing purposes.
The problem I have, is when I get to comparing the username and password from the text file and comparing the two, they don't match.
Even when I print out the two values i.e. $password and $Credentials[$username], I get equal values on screen but the if statement doesn't recognize it using if($Credentials[$username] == $password).
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

please try to trim the values in your validateuser function - wouldn't be the first time a \n or \t or simple space caught me out.
if($value !== NULL)
{
$Credentials[trim($key)] = trim($value);
}
If that's not the case then maybe you can use regex to strip our any non alphanumeric chars from username and password.
eg
$key = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $key);
$value = preg_replace('/[^(\x20-\x7F)]*/','', $value);