Thanks guys for the response.

My application defaults to set exact off. This routine that does the comparison can be called from many places in my application. I was wondering your opinions on whether it would be more efficient to do a set exact on do my comparison with inlist() and then set it back off....or if I should use the $ command? Keeping in mind that this routine can be called millions of times

Thank you,
Paul

>Hi Paul,
>
>SET EXACT ON should do the trick for you.
>
>>I have noticed that inlist works as if we were doing a compare with one equal sign. IOW, it only does the compare for the length of the expressions we are checking.
>>
>>cTemp = "ford"
>>inlist(upper(cTemp),"THE","AND","ARE","FOR") returns .t.
>>
>>I would like to use the inlist function because I think I read that it is very efficient, but I only want it to return .t. if the exact match is found.
>>
>>Is my only option to do something like
>>
>>upper(cTemp) $ "THE|AND|ARE|FOR"
>>
>>I see that this works but I have a routine that can run this comparison a few million times so performance is a huge concern or consideratioin.
>>
>>Thanks in Advance,
>>Paul