After some more googling I found a webscraping example for Ethercard and this works great.
Serial.print("Code ");Serial.println(displayBuff);
char fCode[] = "1111";
Serial.print("Fcode ");Serial.println(fCode);
if (displayBuff ==fCode)
{
Serial.print("Equal.");
}
The result of this is
Code 1111
Fcode 1111
However the code does not return my print. I believed at first this was an issue because of the numerical string, but using ABCDE gives the same answer.