I suppose it is imnportant throughout this discussion to clarify which versions of VFP you are testing with, because internal string handling has changed dramatically from version to version.

>How did you do your tests? Can I find them somewhere? I fail to come up with the same results. In my testings, up to 10 megs, the usual string append is almost linear and strtofile() is much slower for any size.
>
>Vlad
>
>>If you know your strings will be large (even if they're not so large - anything
>>over 25k in my tests) its faster to write output to file and then read the file back into a string with FILETOSTR when you're done.
>>
>>+++ Rick ---