Hi Paul,

Instead of using exact on you can change your INLIST statement into:

INLIST(UPPER(cTemp),"THE ","AND ","ARE ","FOR ")

When the items in the list are padded with spaces to the lenght of the criteria to match, it exactly behaves like SET EXACT ON.

Walter,

>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