Question

So I am writing a script that will curl a site I’ve written that will return a string. I am using it to compare a value that is saved within a file. I am having trouble getting my conditional statement to return true for matching values.

Here is a snippet of my bash code

var1=$(curl -s -w %{http_code}\\n www.somesite.com)
var2=$(cat somefile)

if [[ "$var1" = "$var2" ]]; then
    echo "TRUE"
else
    echo "FALSE"
fi

I have manually looked at both the strings and they seem to be identical. I’ve done wc with all applicable options with it. I’ve copy and pasted both the values into Notepad++ and did a find for the expected string and it said that both values matched the find command.

Obviously, if I manually put the values in the condition it returns true, so I know its not my conditional statement.

My guess is there is some type of hidden character on the end of curl…(‘\r’ or ‘\n’ or something that I am unaware)…or maybe on the end of the file that I am unaware of. Is this a known issue when trying to compare curl output and file content?

This may be a dumb question, but for the life of me I cannot seem to get these strings to match doing it dynamically instead of hardcoding the values in the condition.

Any suggestions would be great. Thanks

Answer 1

$ diff -q -b <(echo $'abc\ndef') <(echo $'abc\r\ndef') > /dev/null ; echo $?
0
$ diff -q -b <(echo $'abc\ndef') <(echo $'abc\r\nde') > /dev/null ; echo $?
1