double byte chars?

[Lars Brehmer]

My project has Russian text fields (Arial,Russian). With one exception, everything works fine.

Problem: a filter-as-you-type script. 

field "t1":     зо
field "t2":     меня зовут Виктор  --underscoring shows the matches--
field "t3":     зовут курить почему

I want to do is find a word in fields t2 and t3 that begins with the 2 letters in field t1. Word 2 in field t2 and word 1 in field t3 should be matches. But this only works if the matching word is the first word in the field! 

Some simple message box scripts:

put fld "t1" & cr & fld "t2" & cr & fld "t3"

The result is a bunch of numbers, symbols and squares. You can clearly spot the matches.

Next in the message box:   --char 1 to 4 -- double byte chars--

put char 1 to 4 in fld "t1" into aText
put char 1 to 4 in word 2 in fld "t2" into bText
put char 1 to 4 in word 1 in fld "t3" into cText
put aText & cr & bText & cr & cText

This should be 3 identical lines, right? But no. Line 2 is missing the final char.

7(square)>(square)
7(square)>
7(square)>(square)

Next: comparing the strings

if cText = aText then beep - it beeps
if cText is in aText then beep - it beeps
if bText = aText then beep - no beep, obviously

BUT

if bText is in aText then beep - also no beep!

And then 

put char 1 to 5 in word 2 in field "t2", it returns the same as the other two:

7(square)>(square)

so then

put char 1 to 5 in word 2 into bText

but 

if bText = (or is in) aText still returns nothing

Why is that last double byte char always missing when the word is not word 1 in its field? If I do char 1 to 3 I get this (again!)

7(square)>
7(square)   --last char missing!
7(square)>  

Using itemDEL = space and char 1 to x in item z behaves the same.

Anyone know the answer?

Cheers,

Lars