Using Drupal's admin I added to an existing content type a new text field with the machine name field_note.
When fetching the field in my code I want to check if $field_name == 'field_note' but it never does. When printing the value of $field_name I get field_note (should match).
Anyway, after a long process and looking at the hex values of both strings I found out that $field_name has 3 additional control characters at its end - the LRM (left to right mark). My workaround for this was using the following code:
$field_name=preg_replace('/\p{C}+/u', "", $field_name);
This works well, but I really want to understand why this happened? I have dozens of fields and only now this started happening with new fields.
A really big clue might be a recent upgrade from Drupal 7.23 to 7.63, but checking the database and field table they all remained with the same encoding.
