I think I've confused things here .. the two problems are unrelated

1) WordNum() and Words() problem : the strings I'm parsing are less than 255 characters .. usually around 40-50 .. this is the problem I'm worried about ..

2) FGETS() .. I'm not saying that I'm having a problem reading large strings .. it's just that they've capped the upper limit .. there may always have been a cap . I ran a few tests in VFP5 .. I can write and read strings of over 1,000,000 characters in length .. in VFP6 I can write a string that large but can only read a string <= 8192


>>Both the functions are failing .. there is no pattern at all .. I can take the same string and parse it 10 times .. sometimes it fails on the first time sometimes the last .. this is true for both functions .. I've tried replacing the delimiter (originally chr(1)) with spaces and tabs .. but no luck ..
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>>It's easy enough to write my own versions but it would be really nice to find out why they are failing.
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>How long are the strings in general? More than 1K, less than 1K etc. You've mentioned below 8K, ever that long?
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>>As to the fgets function .. I sometimes read in really long strings per line (1000 + characters ) .. I think the new limit is 8192 .. or some such eg:
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>>Old version .. this no longer works
>>myStr=fgets(m.ip,10000)
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>>new version .. this works
>>myStr=fgets(m.ip,8192)
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>Sounds as if they've capped the length at 8K. Have you tried 10 * 1024?