>>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
>

I just tested this a few times and switched the order around. It appears you are correct. While the time changes depending on whether it is first, 2nd, 3rd, etc in the order (OCCURS() versus $ etc), $ does seem to be consistently the fastest.