David,

I didn't blame VFP for that. The point was that the file needed to be parsed to get it done. With regular expressions I just needed to look for a pattern (telephone number) and do the crunching from there. Even this solution was done from within VFP (!), we just took a little side-step to get faster results.
In the end everybody was happy because we reduced the process to seconds and not minutes.

I sometimes like to think outside of the (VFP)box to get results. Don't get me wrong, VFP is more than great for what I need to do.

Regards,

Ron


>Ranjan,
>
>If the VFP code took 20 minutes to process a 25mb file the code was not written in a very efficient manner. Don't blame VFP for that sort of fault. It probably could have been written in a manner that would execute within a few seconds. It still wouldn't be as fast as the underlying C/C++ code being executed inside the regexp utility.
>
>>Doing this with vbscript is a lot easier and faster. I once needed to convert a file with generated by a telephonecentral and needed to put a CR in between two telephone numbers. I used VFP and a 25 Mb file took over 20 minutes. Someone pointed me towards vbscript and regular expressions and that did the same trick (with a pattern) under 2 seconds. Why should this be done explicitly by VFP. Some tools sometimes perform faster.