PHP - string from csv reporting more characters

Question

So, I'm making this easy register check page, where a user can enter an ID, and get the results matching that ID from a CSV file.

Problem I'm having, is that for some reason I can't get a good match. Or, it matches every single line.

var_dump on the two comparing strings gives me this:

string(7) "AKM" string(3) "AKM"

AKM is the userID in this example. I've tried utf8 encoding and tried searching eeverywhere. Just cant figure out why I do not get a match, and why var_dump reports AKM to be 7 characters.

Any idea?

Code below:

$file = 'report/report.csv';
$startRow = 6;
$hms = $_GET["hms"];

$csv = array_map(function($v){return str_getcsv($v, "\t");}, file($file));
$csv = array_slice($csv, 6);

foreach($csv as $row){
if (strpos($row,$hms) !== false) {
    $start = strpos($row[1], '(') - 2;
    $end = strlen($row[1]) - strpos($row[1], ')');

    $userID = substr($row[1],0,$start);
    $userName = substr($row[1],$start+3,-2);

    if($row[3] == "true"){
        $passed = "Bestått (".$row[4].")";
    }else{
        $passed = "Ikke bestått";
    }

    $result = [
        "id" => $userID,
        "name" => $userName,
        "passed" => $passed, 
        "datePassed" => $row[7],
        "timeSpent" => $row[6],
    ];

    var_dump($result);
}
}

This is how the CSV looks like:

response

data

identity_uid identity_caption completion passed result attempts time last_access U_5A69E39671310F44A2333C9206DAD20C xxx (Name) 100.0 true 82.6 3 00:57:09 2016/01/04 10:28:54 U_DF5A47B8E1A6E247AA338F571A8F63B1 yyy (Name) 5.0 false 0.0 3 00:04:48 2016/01/15 07:26:05

EDIT: This is the hidden characters I found now:

'' . "\0" . 'A' . "\0" . 'K' . "\0" . 'M' . "\0" . ''

Answer 1

The UTF-8 encoding for Unicode Character 'LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A' (U+0041) is 0x41. Since you have 0x0041 your file is UTF-16 Big Endian.

If you app uses UTF-8 you'll have to convert. You can use iconv() or mb_convert_encoding().