To elaborate on what you have already been given:

local lcOldExact
lcOldExact = set('exact')
set exact on
** do your stuff here
set exact &lcOldExact

>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