>>According to my experience it depends on the size of the string. When it gets huge, like upwards of 5 MB, adding to the string slows down exponentially. We had a process that generated XML files for large reports, growing to hundreds of MB's, which started to take up to 1 hour of processing or even more. this should not have been more then a few minutes. So we switched to writing to file with FWRITE() and that was extremely fast, even when growing up to 2 GB.
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>If you need a fast string concatenation app for simple concatenation, with a final copy into VFP I can give you a DLL that will make it almost instantaneous for the concatenation operations. It could do fast prepends, fast appends, and even fast inserts mid-string.
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>Or if anyone else wants it ... Let me know. I could provide it as an FLL also so it's native as well. And it could be expanded to incorporate a host of string functions that are missing today, including some that could've been used here, like a faster GETWORDNUM().
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>It's interesting how ideas spark ideas.

That sounds interesting. I am dealing a lot with large strings and files, and that could significantly improve performance.