advance help with serialized

First please help!

I’m adding a meta box

I grab the values in the form and serialize them before adding to post_meta.

In my save function I do the regular checks: is it the same as before, is it new.

This is where my problem lies, The comparisons are all hooped:

function mySave($post_id){
   $submitted_data = serialize($_POST['recipe']);
   $saved_data = get_post_meta($post_id, 'recipe', true);
...
}

right now these 2 strings are indentical.

The moment I do this

if($saved_data == $submitted_data){
return $post_id;
}

It breaks!

function mySave($post_id){
   $submitted_data = serialize($_POST['recipe']);
   $saved_data = get_post_meta($post_id, 'recipe', true);

   if($saved_data == $submitted_data){
      echo("saved:" . $saved_data . "");
      echo("submitted:" . $submitted_data . "");
      return $post_id;
   }
   echo("saved:" . $saved_data . "");
   echo("submitted:" . $submitted_data . "");
   die;
...
}

So the result of the above is:

saved: [my value - correct]
submitted: [my value - correct]
saved: [empty string! - not correct!]
submitted: [my value - correct]

BUT the second 2 echos and shouldn’t have executed!
AND If I remove my ‘return’ from inside my If()

saved: [my value - correct]
echo: [my value - correct]
saved: [my value - correct]
echo: [my value - correct]

Again the second 2 echos shouldn’t have executed!

Please please help.