I remember about 10 years ago Steve Black giving a presentation at VFE Devcon in Las Vegas about string handling in VFP, using War and Peace from Project Gutenberg and I remember all of us going "Oooooh". Since that time I have taken it as an article of faith that VFP had string handling powers beyond the reach of other languages.

So in light of my surprising results on the loop in VFP vs Other Languages(Python/Ruby) I thought I'd try something similar.

First, the task was to load War and Peace ( over 3.2 million characters ) into a string and replace war with PEACE and peace with WAR. To give VFP the edge, I made the finding case insensitive ( for some perverse reason C# does not have a case insensitive string replace )

Here's the VFP code : ( my VFP is rusty so if there is a better way to do this, I'm listening )

CD c:\users\pagan\documents\test
fname = "war and peace.txt"

SET SAFETY OFF

nStart = SECONDS()

x = FILETOSTR(fname)

x = STRTRAN(x,"war","www",-1,-1,1)
x = STRTRAN(x,"peace","ppp",-1,-1,1)
x = STRTRAN(x,"www","PEACE")
x = STRTRAN(x,"ppp","WAR")

=STRTOFILE(x,"peace and war.txt",0)

nStop = SECONDS()

? nstop - nstart

On my box this takes about 2.3 seconds. Pretty cool.

Here's my C# - compensating as best I can for the case sensitivity :

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
            stopwatch.Start();

            string fname =@"C:\Users\Pagan\Documents\test\war and peace.txt";
            string result = @"C:\Users\Pagan\Documents\test\csharp result.txt";
            string foo = File.ReadAllText(fname);
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(foo);

            sb.Replace("war","www");
            sb.Replace("War","www");
            sb.Replace("WAR", "www");
            sb.Replace("peace","ppp");
            sb.Replace("Peace","ppp");
            sb.Replace("PEACE", "ppp");
            sb.Replace("www","PEACE");
            sb.Replace("ppp","WAR");

            foo = sb.ToString();
            File.WriteAllText(result, foo);

            stopwatch.Stop();

            Console.WriteLine("Time elapsed: {0}", stopwatch.Elapsed);
            Console.Read();

six tenths of a second.

It gets even more interesting when a loop is added to build the string to over 32 million characters by concatenating the original string ten times before doing the replacements, resulting in a 35 mb or so output file.

C# - about 6 seconds
VFP just dies, shows as not responding in the task manager and has to be killed.

It should be mentioned that the 10x test may not be entirely fair as the VS is 64 bit and the VFP is 32 bit and there are 6gb of ram on this box. But the single file version seems dispositive in any case.

I'd encourage others to try this and tell me what I'm doing wrong.