Seeks help to compare strings stored in arrays

[lookof2day]

Hi
I'm trying to compare two files names using the function given below.
The files to be compared are named as
xxx_yyy_abc_def_.rtf && xxx_yyy_abc_def_.html
The extentions and the underscores are removed from the file names and then stored in two different arrays. So the file names stored in arrays are like:

HTML_FILE_ARR[0]=abc def
FILE_ARR[0]=abc def
Their word counts are same.
But when I compare the two strings stored in different arrays, they are never equal.
Can you please help me out with it?

ARR_INC=0
function storeFilesInArray {
    cd ../sharepoint_url
    set -a HTML_FILE_ARR
    for HTML_FILE in `ls $STREAM*.html`
    do
      HTML_FILE_NAME=`echo $HTML_FILE`
      truncateHtmlFileName
      HTML_FILE_ARR[$ARR_INC]="${HTML_FILE_NAME}"
      ARR_INC=`expr $ARR_INC + 1`
    done

    FILE_ARR_LEN=`expr $ARR_INC - 1`

    ARR_INC=0
    cd ../result
    set -a FILE_ARR
    for FILE in `ls $STREAM*_.rtf`
    do
      FILE_NAME=`echo $FILE`
      truncateFileNames
      FILE_ARR[$ARR_INC]="${FILE_NAME}"
      ARR_INC=`expr $ARR_INC + 1`
    done

    for NAME in "${FILE_ARR[@]}"
    do
        for HTML_NAME in "${HTML_FILE_ARR[@]}"
        do
           echo $NAME  "..." $HTML_NAME
           echo "$NAME" | wc -c
           echo "$HTML_NAME" | wc -c
           if [ "${NAME}" == "{$HTML_NAME}" ]; then

               echo ${NAME} "....." ${HTML_NAME}
           fi
        done
    done
}

[lookof2day]

This is ugly but it works!:)

if [ "$NAME*" == "$HTML_NAME*" ]; then