bug, querk, or mistake?

Hi all. I have just been writing some fairly simple PHP code when I cam across a problem. The following if statement always claims to be false. However, I print out the variables in the if (which are strings) and they are identical. Here it is: if($reqcat["indexname"] == $row["maincat"]){ I get the values through 2 while loops (based on mySQL results) that look something like this: while($reqcat = mysql_fetch_array($reqcat_results)){ It may be an error in my code but I thought it may also be a bug or a querk. If anyone else has come across this could you please tell me how you solved it? Thank you Adam Charnock