Comparing PHP's NumberFormatter::formatCurrency results

Question

I'm having problems unit testing a library that uses NumberFormatter::formatCurrency. After some trial and error, I've narrowed down the problem to this test case:

/**
 * @dataProvider getLocales()
 */
public function test($locale, $expected)
{
    $number_formatter = new \NumberFormatter($locale, \NumberFormatter::CURRENCY);
    $actual = $number_formatter->formatCurrency(3000.05, 'EUR');
    $this->assertEquals($expected, $actual, $locale.' failed');
}

public function getLocales()
{
    return array(
        array('en_US', '€3,000.05'),
        array('fr_FR', '3 000,05 €'),
        array('de_DE', '3.000,05 €'),
    );
}

The results are:

fr_FR failed
Failed asserting that two strings are equal.
Expected :3 000,05 €
Actual   :3 000,05 €


de_DE failed
Failed asserting that two strings are equal.
Expected :3.000,05 €
Actual   :3.000,05 €

As you can see the failed tests seem to have identical strings, so it should be a problem of locale.

I've tried comparing with strcoll, setting the locale before the comparison, and other combinations with no luck.

I guess it's something to do with different utf-8 codes in each language. But how can I compare those strings then?

Answer 1

I found the solution. PHP's NumberFormatter inserts a special space character, the so-called No-Break-Space (maybe you know  ).

if you convert the read value

str_replace("\xc2\xa0", " ", $actual);

everything will be fine.