How to compare strings that have an ampersand in them in PowerShell - string

Question

I am using PowerShell to compare two strings that have an ampersand (&) in them (i.e. the string "Policies & Procedures").
No matter what I try, I cannot get these strings to match. I have tried trimmed the strings to get rid of an extra white spaces. I have tried wrapping the the string in both single and double quotes (and a combination of both):
"Policies & Procedures"
'Policies & Procedures'
"'Policies & Procedures'"
The code I am using to compare the strings is:
if ($term1 -eq $term2) {
do something
}
Inspecting the strings visually - they are identical, however the if statement never evaluates to true. Is there a way to compare these two strings so that it does evaluate to true?
EDIT
The context in which I am doing this string compare is looking for a term name in a taxonomy for a SharePoint site. Here is the code I am using:
function getTerm($termName) {
foreach($term in $global:termset.Terms) {
$termTrimmed = $term.Name.trim()
Write-Host "term name = $termTrimmed" -foregroundcolor cyan
if ($termTrimmed -eq $termName) {
return $term
}
}
return null
}
I have printed both term.Name and termName to the screen and they are identical. If there is no ampersand in the string, this function works. If there is an ampersand this function fails. This is how I know the ampersand is the problem.

Answer 1

This is a known quirk:
There are two types of ampersands that you need to be aware of when
playing with SharePoint Taxonomy
Our favorite and most loved
& ASCII Number: 38
And the impostor
＆ ASCII Number: 65286
After reading this article by Nick Hobbs, it became apparent
that when you create a term it replaces the 38 ampersand with a
65286 ampersand.
This then becomes a problem if you want to do a comparison with your
original source (spreadsheet, database, etc) as they are no longer the
same.
As detailed in Nick’s article, you can use the
TaxonomyItem.NormalizeName method to create a "Taxonomy" version of
your string for comparison:
Try this (not tested on real SharePoint):
function getTerm($termName)
{
foreach($term in $global:termset.Terms) {
$termNormalized = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.TaxonomyItem]::NormalizeName($term.Name)
if ($termNormalized -eq $termName) {
return $term
}
}
return null
}

Answer 2

After converting both strings to char arrays and comparing the unicode value of the ampersands the problem is revealed. The ampersand used in the search string has a value of 38 while the ampersand returned from the SharePoint term store has a value of 65286 (called a full ampersand although looks identical to a regular ampersand on screen).
The solution was to write my own string comparison function and take into account the differences in the ampersand values. Here is the code:
function getTerm($termName) {
$searchChars = $termName.toCharArray()
$size = $searchChars.Count;
foreach($term in $global:termset.Terms) {
$match = $True
$chars = $term.Name.trim().toCharArray()
if ($size -eq $chars.Count) {
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $size; $i++) {
if ($searchChars[$i] -ne $chars[$i]) {
# handle the difference between a normal ampersand and a full width ampersand
$charCode1 = [int] $searchChars[$i]
$charCode2 = [int] $chars[$i]
if ((($charCode1 -eq 38) -or ($charCode1 -eq 65286 )) -and (($charCode2 -eq 38) -or ($charCode2 -eq 65286 ))) {
continue
} else {
$match = $False
break
}
}
}
} else {
$match = $False
}
if ($match -eq $True) {
return $term
}
}
return $null
}