PHP string comparison won't match seemingly identical string

Question

I am scraping the DOM of a static site with PHP and pulling out specific bit\'s of data so I can put stuff into a database.

For this example I am storing the inner H

Answer 1

Solution is to use a regex like this

    function clean($string) {
$string = str_replace(' ', '-', $string); // Replaces all spaces with hyphens.
return preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9\-\;\,\?\*\%\@\$\!\(\)\#\=\&]/', '', $string); // Removes special chars
}

Adapt it to the special char you need or not add the one you want to keep catching like this \# or esle \=