Whoa!  The original problem turned out to be the junk at the end of the record.

If you do a direct read of the record with supertool and do a list, you get the
following for the displayed element:

element-edit = ^^/^^/^^....................

This tells me that there is some kind of character following the portion that I
am looking for.  If you use the following if, (select using the first 8
characters) the records are found just fine!  The '^' is not a reserved
character when you are looking at a text string.

if element-edit(1,1,8)="^^/^^/^^"

Thanks for all of the input, but the problem was more syntax than anything else.

Kevin