---
title: Matching characters
key: matching-characters
unambiguous: true
objective: true
---

A sequence of characters is considered to _match_ another if, after removing leading and trailing [whitespace characters][] and replacing remaining occurrences of one or more whitespace characters with a single space, the two sequences of characters are equal character-by-character, ignoring any differences in letter casing.

[whitespace characters]: #whitespace 'Definition of Whitespace'