Jim,

FoxPro didn't establish this feature it may go all the way back to dBASEII.

If I'm doing "contained" in string searchs I use $ or AT. and test for inequality with !(x==y)

>OK, I can see how it would be necessary in the scheme of string comparisons that "" = "anything". But I somehow had gotten the impression that x # y for sting comparisons when either x or y were empty and the other has a non-blank value. Must have been Clipper or xBase.
>
>You are right about ==. I use it most of the time. But in this particular instance I could not since I needed to test whether the significant part of x = the significant part of y, disregarding trailing spaces.