Why is it not looking for news in the database by title?

Question

PHP

Good afternoon. I take news from the regional site:

$html = file_get_contents('https://my-domain.ru');
$doc = phpQuery::newDocument($html);
$news = array();
$entry = pq("article")->find(".lenta-big-item");

foreach($entry as $row ){
    $row = pq($row);
    $title = $row->find('.lenta-title')->text();
    $i = search_news(trim($title));
    
    if( $i ){
        $news[] = $row->find('.lenta-title')->attr('href');
    }
}

The search_news() function should search for news by title, and if no news is found, return true.
Here is the function itself:

function search_news( $title = '' ){
    include "../includes/config.php";
    $query = "SELECT * FROM news WHERE news_title LIKE '%$title%'";
    $r = mysqli_query($connect, $query);

    if($r->num_rows == 0) {
        return true;
    }else{
        return false;
    }
    mysqli_close($connect);
}

The problem is that if I pass the title in the $title variable, then the news is not found in the database. If I redefine the $title variable in the function ($title = 'News title'), then the news is successfully searched in the database. I don't understand what could be wrong? Encoding? I don’t understand what needs to be done so that the news is normally searched for by the variable passed to the function. Tell me please.

Answer 1

https://habr.com/en/post/563530/ As galaxy
correctly wrote in the comments, if the database "does not find" something, you need to convert both strings to a binary representation using bin2hex() and see the difference. and then add str_replace based on the results