Open

PHP compare values with HTML special characters

I am trying to compare rows from 2 PHP arrays like this...

if ($row1[$i] == $row2[$i]) {

    echo 'Rows match';

} else {

    echo 'Rows do not match';

}

This is working effectively till it comes throughout something that is encoded, so the apostrophe is a superb example. So the beneath 2 aren't the same...

This is an apostrophe'

This is an apostrophe'

I've tried the use of htmlspecialchars_decode to attempt to convert them earlier than evaluating but this isn't working. How can I compare those 2 rows?