>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 did some testing now (I don't know how representative they are):

CLEAR
CREATE CURSOR crsTest (MyMemo M)
APPEND BLANK
REPLACE MyMemo WITH REPLICATE([A],16000000)+[ My String]

m1 = SECONDS()
AT([My String], MyMemo)
? [AT], SECONDS()-m1                  && 0.047

m1 = SECONDS()
RAT([My String], MyMemo)
? [RAT], SECONDS()-m1                 && 0.053

m1 = SECONDS()
aaa = [My String] $ MyMemo
? [$], SECONDS()-m1                   && 0.045

m1 = SECONDS()
aaa = OCCURS([My String], MyMemo)
? [OCCURS], SECONDS()-m1              && 0.284

m1 = SECONDS()
SELECT * FROM crsTest WHERE MyMemo LIKE [%My String%] INTO CURSOR aaaa
? [SELECT +LIKE], SECONDS()-m1        && 0.980