>I skipped quite a few posts of this thread so I am unsure of yout intentions or the job needing to be done ;-) But I wonder if you could not parse the strings into separate strings first and do the actual work on the shorter sub-strings (provided that some operations are not needed on all segments and then concat again? Probably already a few SQL parsers in exitance in Dotnet as well....

Yes, a mix and match can probably be considered.

Thanks