Question

Lets say I have:

$a = "5,8,0";
$b = "8,0,5";

How to compare them while a regular comparison will fail, the comma separator will always be there but the order of the elements (which are ids of products so they are always integers) don’t have to be the same (the order).

Any idea about how to do this in PHP?

Answer 1

Split them into individual arrays, and then compare the two arrays.

$a = "5,8,0";
$b = "8,0,5";

$array_a = explode($a, ",");
$array_b = explode($b, ",");

if (count(array_diff($array_a, $array_b))===0)
    echo "The two strings contain the same values.";
else
    echo "The two strings do NOT contain the same values.";