>>Assuming a memo field in a cursor is HUGE, and I want to look for a string: 'my string' what would be the fastest and least memory hog way of doing that? I think for sure that $ is not it... is alines() better? It won't be an exact match, in other words, I need to see if 'my string' is in there, but it may be in there as 'this is my string.' etc...
>>
>>I don't need to know where in the memo field it is, just whether it is there or not.
>
>I really didn't do any testing which is faster:
>[$], AT(), OCCURS(), ALINES() or LIKE (in SQL-SELECT)
>How HUGE is that MEMO?
>BTW if you want ONLY to check if that string is there I think [$] will be faster than ALINES, just because it only check if the string is there but ALINES() parse the string to array and after that you should LOOP through it and us [$] to see if there some line contains that string (not sure though :-))

So far my tests show that OCCURS() is the fastest but I was interested in others' experiences. Thanks Boris.