Rick,

VFP 6.0 has much faster string handling. I haven't done any tests on it yet, but it may well be fast enough that you don't have to resort to breaking strings up into smaller chunks.

>FWIW - I have read in 21,756K of text file into a string. BUT, if you do that...divide it up into smaller chunks for faster processing. When you're dealing with string data of this size you get to find out how many functions process the string 1 character at a time...and it seems the all start from the beginning...
>I found it worth the time to divide the string into chunks and then make sure I handled the boundaries correctly. The difference in speed "seemed" exponential.....but don't quote me on that. :> - emphasis on the word "seemed" :>