title: utterly weird behavior in basic string comparison
body: <p>this doesn't make any sense to me. must be wrong or painfully obvious.</p>
  
  <p>after slicing and dicing, i got 2 vars with the following values in vb.net:</p>
  
  <pre><code>strTag = "&amp;lt;#&lt;span class=SpellE&gt;vermittler_person_Name&lt;/span&gt;&amp;gt;"
  tmp    = "&amp;lt;#&lt;span class=SpellE&gt;vermittler_person_Name&lt;/span&gt;&amp;gt;"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>comparing the vars gives a false:</p>
  
  <pre><code>strTag = tmp ' ==&gt; false
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>comparing the values directly right there gives a true:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"&amp;lt;#&lt;span class=SpellE&gt;vermittler_person_Name&lt;/span&gt;&amp;gt;" = "&amp;lt;#&lt;span class=SpellE&gt;vermittler_person_Name&lt;/span&gt;&amp;gt;" ' ==&gt; true
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>both are strings, i tried all kinds of stuff: string.compare, string.equals, also regex etc. etc. everything works perfect with all the other strings with simlilar structure, just not and only not with </p>
  
  <pre><code>"vermittler_person_Name"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in the middle... any ideas?</p>