>>Actually, I don't know if I should be worried at all - it seems to strip only the last character from memo fields created from a text file (tab delimited) exported from something that seems like Access (uses .mdbs for sure), and it doesn't seem to go beyond 256, so I'm losing just the last byte sometimes. Still, I wouldn't like to have to worry about this in case I needed longer chunks.
>
>Might be enough to add the cumulative string lengths plus delimiters together as a check. It'd probably be better to locate any string of 255 characters within the source (using AT() I suppose), then check the next character to see if it's a delimiter or not.

Far easier than that - I've just turned the logic around. Since the string I'm chopping is one line from a tab delimited file, instead of
for i=1 to words(string, tab)
chop=wordnum(string, i, tab)
grind(chop)
endfor

I've done this:

string=chrtran(string, tab, cr)
n=alines(array, string)
for i=1 to n
grind(array[i])
endfor

Furthermore, it seems to be about four times faster this way. Not sure if this is the only thing that influenced the speed, but sure can't complain about the outcome, right?