As a student of VFP, I have really appreciated this discussion on padding, string comparison, and SET EXACT. It seems I have to look this material up about half the time I want to do a string comparison, and was wondering why I was having so much trouble retaining the reference information. It was confidence-building for me to see the experts struggling a tad with this :-).

On a related topic (I think), I know that a form property doesn't get padded (it's initialized to .F.), and assigning a string to it doesn't create padding, but: I've noticed that in a text box, e.g., when I enter a string, .value gets padded with spaces -- the number of spaces depends on the width of the text box. Initializing the text box's .value in the Form's Init with a fixed number of spaces appears to get ignored.

Am I correct on this? What is the logic behind this behavior?