Well I don't see anything in your code that would explain how $form{source} would look the same but give a different result. I do see that there is no "else", are you sure that you never fall in those cases? You could add else { die "This shouldn't happen" } just to be 100% sure. Also rather than print the values, you can use Data::Dump (or Data::Dumper with $Data::Dumper::Useqq) to see exactly what is in the string (eg: make invisible chars explicit). You can also let perl itself check if the two strings are identical, with the ^ to show exactly where the difference is:

my $form_source = "files/blanks/state/$state/$type/contract.pdf";
die pp $form_source ^ $form{source} unless $form_source eq $form{sourc
+e}; # pp from Data::Dump
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If all of this fails, you'll have to show more code.