I have a text file that I have to parse into a table. There are around
47,000 lines in it.

I don't have a file layout, but it is asteriCk-delimited as in:


NOISAT, MARY *Z7700286-31*31.75**27.18*092600*G0001*0301**1*300*300***0*300*


There are 2 problems here:

1. I don't know the layout

2. Some of the lines are VERY long, upwards of 800-1000 characters
in length.

If I can determine the length of the longest line, I can use OCCURS() to
determine the number of asteriks in that line, and from that determine
the number of columns to create.

So I appended it into a memo field, then I ran this little program:


 SET MEMOWIDTH TO 8192

 USE Temp1

 nLineNo = 0
 nTotLines = MEMLINES(DataField)
 nMaxLen = 0
 nLongest = 0

 FOR nLineNo = 1 TO nTotLines

   cString = ALLTRIM(MLINE(Data, nLineNo))

   IF LEN(cString) > nMaxLen
     nMaxLen = LEN(cString)
     nLongest = nLineNo
   ENDIF

 ENDFOR


The problem is, this program take FOREVER to run, literally HOURS! I need
a simpler solution.

TIA