I was mistaken to say specifically -1 and 1. It actually returns a value less than zero, zero or a value greater than zero. This value is not supposed to indicate anything about the relative lengths of the two strings, but rhather there relative order when comapison is based on Unicode value rather than "alphabetic". I'm still confused as to what Techno meant by that line I quoted. I thought may be he meant if one string is n characters long and the other is m characters long then return the last abs(n-m) characters of the longer string.