Comparing strings doesn't work

Question

I'm making something for a dialogue system that reads "cues" from a textfile to identify which emotion to show in the character's portrait during a conversation. Basically if the current line says "2", it means change the portrait to where the character is smiling. "1" for neutral, etc. Unfortunately the part that compares the emotion variable, and the string from the text file doesn't return true.

I already checked using debug.log if the string from the text file is showing the right number, and it does. I tried comparing them using "==" sign and ".equals();" but neither seems to work.

public TextAsset textFileP;
public string[] textLineP;   
public GameObject character;
public Animator anim;
public string smile = "2";

void Start()
{
    anim = GetComponent<Animator>();
   
    if (textFileP != null)
    {
        textLineP = (textFileP.text.Split('\n'));
        character.SetActive(true);
    }
}

void Update()
{
    
    if (DialogueParser.nextLine < DialogueParser.textLine.Length - 1)
    {
        
        //change portrait
        if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Mouse0))
        {
            string cue = textLineP[DialogueParser.nextLine];
            // Debug.Log(cue);
            if (cue.Equals(smile))
            {
                anim.SetInteger("2", 2);
            }

           
        }
      

Answer 1

When you create your text file with most text editors on Windows, then lines aren't terminated just by the line-feed character (\n) but also by an additional carriage-return character before it (\r\n). So when you split such a text file by \n, then you will receive a bunch of strings suffixed by the invisible \r character.

You can actually see that in Notepad++ when you enable display of these symbols with View->Show Symbol->Show End Of Line. You will notice that there are not one but two invisible characters at the end of each line.

To fix that problem, split the file by "\r\n". Or if you want to make sure that it works even when your content creators use Linux (which uses only \n) or MacOS (which uses only \r), then you might either have to normalize your file content with .Replace, or you split the string in a way which accepts any flavor of line endings.