Delimited file values behaving strangely...

Hi folks, A strange one - unless I am having a brainstorm... I am reading in tab delimited files created in Excel on Windows and uploaded to Linux. Cell A1 contains a numeric id - I extract this into a variable, $id, by exploding on \n and \t. But for some files, the values of $id do not behave as expected. Say the value should be "23". If I echo, it prints as "23". But comparisons fail to match: if( $id == 23 ) ... It also fails if I try to find the value as a key in an array: if( isset( $my_array[$id] ) ) ... On the other hand, values from some of the files work as expected. One clue: if I try and cast the values that are failing to int, the cast produces the value 0 (zero). On the other hand, the values that are working as expected cast from, say, the string 22 to the int 22 as expected. Never seen anything like this before - can anyone give me a pointer?? -- Geoff Caplan Advantae Ltd