>I see some characters in the VFP hex viewers, and to do manipulation on a file, I need to convert this to a string; e.g.: MyString = chr(0xFF) + chr(0x7F) + ...
>
>I was wondering whether there was a less cumbersome way to express a hexadecimal dump as a string.

I'm not sure what you're asking. If you do FILETOSTR() the file contens will be in a string.