I think you're mistaken.
From the edit line:
//if (Jeroi == Jeroi_away) { echo -a true } | else { echo -a false }
You'll see that it is false and not true. What is your exact IF statement where you think that returns true?
=== is case sensitive. That means only that Jeroi is not the same as jeroi. It has nothing to do with additional characters, such as _away being on the nick.
Hash table items are case-insensitive for item names. That means that you cannot have both Jeroi and jeroi. You can have only one item with the same letters no matter what the case is. * The exception being that UTF-8 probably treats upper and lower case characters as different characters, but for normal A-Z and a-z, they are treated the same in the item name.
Your wildcard match currently doesn't match nick_away. It only matches nick. Unless you specifically add the person's nick_away nick, of course. If you want it to match the nick_away nick without specifically adding it, then you'd use the wildcard match for nick*. You need that * for it to do that kind of match. As mentioned, though... if you do that, you risk matching incorrectly. For example, someone might have have the nick Ram and another have the nick Ramses. Ram* would match both. You will need to decide what will be the best option for you.
