>Hi Dan,
>
> That string's length is 2,725 characters. I wasn't able to find anything written in stone that said "VFP's maximum character variable length is ###" but I've always tried to keep them below 256. I was able to make your code work normally in the debugger as long as len(a) was <1800. When it hit 1801, it started going haywire. And not just the problem you experienced either. I was seeing erroneous results in the watch window and Source Not Available errors.
>
> I know there are times when I use much larger strings than this (File2Str of binaries). I'm not sure why I get away with that. Maybe because I'm not doing anything but dumping the string immediately into a memo?
>
> Try shortening the string and see what I mean.
>
>Marty
>
>
>>That's just great. I've had problems with this for a while. It can be very irritating when stepping through a program and the debugger decides to jump to a new function which is not currently executing or as in this case not executing at all.

Did you get the same results as I did?