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>MY Question: Which method gives us the least performance hit? In other languages, parsing a string is a fairly slow process. Are expressions in a view optimized?
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>I know, we should make the necessary changes, BUT we need to release the Windows system in pieces and have it co-exist with the DOS Clipper 5.0 system. We estimate that replacement of all DOS programs might take 2 - 3 years, and we can't wait that long. Maybe, in version 2.
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>TIA
>Mike

I'm not sure which method is the most efficient, but VFP is EXTREMELY fast at string manipulation. In fact, VFP 6.0 is up to 200x faster than 5.0. I have a text file that I process every day. Because it can have fields up to 2000 characters in length, I read it using FILE2STR(), then parse it. It takes just a few moments to pull all the data apart and save it to the DBF.