putting wp_title into a variable is evaluating strange

i’m trying to change a custom query based on the page title, so I’m using wp_title('',false); to put into a variable, then use a switch statement to do different things.

Using this code:

$my_page_name = wp_title('',false);
echo 'page name: '.$my_page_name.'<br />';
switch ($my_page_name){
	case "Activities and Family Fun":
		$cat_slug = "activites-and-family-fun";
		break;
	case "Automotive":
		$cat_slug = "automotive";
		break;
	case "Dry Cleaning":
		$cat_slug = "dry-cleaning";
		break;
	default:
		echo "no cat_slug value found, but the page name was ".$my_page_name."<br />";

i actually have like 10 more cases in that statement but that’s irrelevant. $my_page_name echoes as “Automotive” so the $cat_slug should be set to “automotive”, but instead it goes to the default where $my_page_name is still “Automotive.”

That seems completely wrong, but here’s what’s the crazy part: if I add this code before my switch statement

if($my_page_name = "Automotive")
		echo 'himom';
	else
		echo 'everything is insane';

then it echoes “himom” and my switch statement work correctly, $cat_slug gets set to “automotive”.

But why!?

Is there something about switch statements that I don’t know about or is it something in the wp_title call that’s buggy, or something else? My variable has the right information, but my switch statement can’t tell unless I run an if statement with that variable first, and that doesn’t make any sense at all to me.

Thanks for any help.