匹配表格中的标题（字符串）与表单输入标题（字符串）

I have a issue table in my database. This issues table has a unique constraint on its issueTitle column.

Now I want to store another title, if another title with same name doesn't exists. I used where clause in laravel. It works for below cases which have title like this:

Title field in table: 'Hello', 'Hello', 'Hello'
Title from form data :'hello', 'HELLO' , ' Hello'

But it doesn't work for these cases:

Title field in table: 'Hello World', 'Hello World?',
Title from form data :'hello(more than one space)World', 'HELLO WORLD'

I hope you got it. I want to check if it's unique title only then store it in the table.

I tried to check the title if it exists with same name. If it exists, redirected to a page with error having 'issue already exists'.

IssuesController.php

public function store(Request $request)
{
    $this->validate($request, [
        'title'    => 'required|max:255',
        'category' => 'required|not_in:0',
        'body'     => 'required',
    ]);

    $issue = new Issue;
    $issue->issue_title = Input::get('title');

    if (Issue::where('issue_title', $issue->issue_title)->first()) {
        return redirect('/dashboard')->with('error', 'Issue already raised!');
    }

    $issue->issue_body = Input::get('body');
    $issue->user_id = Auth::user()->id;
    $issue->cat_id = 1;
    $issue->save();

    return redirect('/dashboard')->with('success', 'Issue raised successfully!');

}

I want every title stored unique.
What I think can be done is :

Remove all whitespaces
Make whole sentence to small letter
Remove marks like (?,.,!) from end.
Example: Careless police in Utopia becomes carelesspoliceinutopia

Also we can't do this to store in database for first time because it will be hard to retrieve it and show on another view. I think it will better to get the title from database, change it in the above form, do the same with input data and, then compare it.