Hey I'm so glad I posted this... two great solutions now that improve over what I came up with :-)

Haven't tried this yet but this looks like another clean read/only solution.


+++ Rick ---


>Hi Rick,
>
>I've posted this as a comment on your blog... If you parse a long string in VFP and don't modify the string as you go, it's a lot faster to copy the string in memory and then use SYS(2600) to access any part of it. This avoids any performance issues due to locking and unlocking the string or providing a safe copy for API functions.
>

>LOCAL lnX, lcString, lnLength, lnBase, lnSecs
>lcString = REPLICATE("1234567890",100000)
>
>	Declare Integer HeapAlloc in Win32Api Integer, Integer, Integer
>	Declare Integer HeapFree in Win32APi Integer, Integer, Integer
>	Declare Long GetProcessHeap in Win32API
>      
>lnLength = LEN(lcString)
>TRANSFORM(lnLength,"9,999,999")
>
>lnSecs = SECONDS()
>
>lnBase = HeapAlloc( GetProcessHeap(), 0, m.lnLength )
>Sys(2600, m.lnBase, m.lnLength, m.lcString)
>FOR lnX = 1 TO lnLength
>	lcVal = Sys(2600,m.lnBase-1+m.lnX,1)
>ENDFOR
>HeapFree( GetProcessHeap(), 0, m.lnBase )
>
>? "SYS(2600): " +  TRANSFORM(SECONDS() - lnSecs )
>

>On my machine, this runs in 0.33 seconds vs 37 seconds for the SUBSTR() approach.