In this case, which I admit is not used much, I am controlling the string so they do indeed match and so it does what I need.

>Good case to show why checking the normalize()d version of an expression is mostly pointless. Your framework may be setting it like this (normalized into INACTIVE=.F.) and you may be expecting .NOT.INACTIVE and it would never match. Because anything worth doing can be done at least three ways in VFP.