>That explanation might leave someone thinking that there is no difference in how Char and VarChar are stored in the DBF.
>

David, does this "values stored in the field are variable length values and they are not padded to the length of the field" sound the same as Char field?

>If I am interpreting what I see in the DBF correctly, the VarChar will have a Hex value as the last character (holding the length of the actual field value) -- if the value length is less than the field length. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I would say the last byte contains the length of the value if it is shorter than the max length. You can find the full description in documentation.