>>I am absolutely convinced that you are wrong. I am curious to see if you can prove your statement.

I think we're both right- sort of! VFP Help confirms that if two strings are compared with the == operator, the expressions must contain exactly the same characters, including blanks, to be considered equal and that SET EQUAL is ignored.

CREATE CURSOR c1 (myfield1 c(10),myfield2 c(11))

? c1.myfield1==c1.myfield2
? c1.myfield2==c1.myfield1

INSERT INTO c1 VALUES ("Hello","Hello")

? c1.myfield1==c1.myfield2
? c1.myfield2==c1.myfield1

.F.
.F.
.F.
.F.

This is what I focused on as Walter said this wasn't about VFP data. However if using SQL, including in a resultset from a backend: == acts the same as = with SET ANSI ON- IOW the shorter string is padded.

CREATE CURSOR c1 (myfield1 c(10), myfield2 c(11))
INSERT INTO c1 VALUES ("Hello","Hello")
SELECT * FROM c1 WHERE myfield1==myfield2
? _TALLY

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