>>In the present case, wouldn't it be simpler to do a padl(...) on whatever the user types, before doing the comparison?
>
>I dont' think so. There's no way to determine how many zero's to pad with. BOTH the following values should yield TRUE

>0024567890
>0000000290

>
>I'm reasonably sure what the user types needs to stay as-is on the right side of the = statement and we need some expression on the left to strip off the leading blanks (as Naomi said - easy in VFP 9).
>
>If anyone can come up with something better, I'm all ears (........well..........eyes)
>but not to waste too much brain-power because I do have a working solution.

A simple pedestrian, old-style loop, perhaps:

do while inlist(left(lcStr, 1), " ", "0")
   lcstr=substr(lcstr,2)
enddo

And padl() it with spaces to whichever length you want then.

update: ah, now I see what you mean... you need to build a search list. You can create an array of "2", "02", "002", "0002" etc until the length of the string is 10, and then scan for anything that is in the array.

lcStr="{what user entered}"
dime aStr[10-len(lcStr)+1]
for i=0 to alen(astr)-1
  astr[i+1]=repl("0", i)+lcstr
endfor
scan for ascan(astr, yourfield)>0
...
endscan

Alternately, you could build a list for the inlist function, and then macro it... something like

lcExpr=[inlist(myfield, "290", "0290", "00290","000290", "0000290", .... "0000000290")]
* and then 
scan for &lcExpr
...
endscan

Actually, you could build these lists backwards, making sure that you padl() whatever the user enters with zeros to fill c(10), then build the array or list by chopping one character from the left until the first character is a nonzero.