Comparing strings that are equal, but If statements saysthey are differ

Question

I've been trying to find why my object is always getting set to a state of
being modified and have found the following method that takes a "string"
passed into it and the attribute that is being compared is also a "string".
The test thinks that they are not equal, but the logMessage shows that the
contents are the same. I've used this same kind of method with other
"strings" and have them working just fine. The version of Forte is 3g and
maybe in a couple of months we will be moving up to version 3.m.2
Any ideas would be helpful, for now, I'm going to take the strings and
assign them to TextData and compare them that way. I know that I've had to
do this before for another object, but I don't understand why it works on
some and not on others.
Thanks, Michael
Method code:
setDefaultText(pDefaultText:string)
tt : Textdata = new;
tt.concat('aDefaultText:|').concat(aDefaultText).concat('|\n');
tt.concat('pDefaultText:|').concat(pDefaultText).concat('|');
logMessage(tt);
if (aDefaultText <> pDefaultText) then
aDefaultText = pDefaultText;
setModified('aDefaultText');
end if;
Output from logMessage:
31-Jul-2000 08:42:10 CHWOReportPrompts aDefaultText:||
pDefaultText:||
! Collect Stable(Pages:8993)->(Pages:6307)
Michael J Schumacher
Systems Analyst
Carlson Hospitality Worldwide - Reservation Center
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: michael.schumachercarlson.com

Answer 1

I took a class in school on file organization and processing which used a book of the same name, and had a section of spell checking algorithms that used a trie. I don't remember the specifics, but it could skip over the current character if it didn't match, and keep processing the rest of the string. One part of the matching was that if there was an extra character, (if you treat words as characters in your example), it would match the rest of the word. The book was by Alan Tharp if you want to try to look it up. That's probably overkill for your problem, but it might give you some inspiration.