I'm working on a project where I need to shred a string (ala shredding and XML string) into a set of tables. The string is passed to me by a call to an *.OCX. The typical length of the string is 43K+ bytes. The string structure looks like this:

Data-Pair /pair delimiter/ Data-Pair /pair delimiter/ etc.
There are additional delimiters inside each data-pair. Essentially a data-pair consists of a delimited string that defines the schema and also separates the schema from the actual value. A Data-Pair ends up looking something like this:
Grand-ParentField/Delimiter/ParentField/Delimiter/Field/Value Delimiter/Value.

My "parsing" engine works, but it's very slow. (About 2-3 seconds per string on a PII 300 Mhz notebook.) I need to get down to sub-second times without simply buying a faster notebook. I'm working on enhancements to make the string shorter. But I'm also looking for a way to more efficiently pass through the string as I shred it. That's what this post is for. So far the most efficient method of parsing the string is this:

Do While .T.
DataPair = SubString( LongString, 1, At( , LongString )- 1 )
* Parsing code goes here
LongString = SubString( LongString, At( , LongString ) + 1 )
If Len( LongString ) = 0
Exit
EndIf
EndDo

I've tried NextWord from foxtools, ( I'm running VFP 6 ) but it's actually slower than this approach is.

Ideas anyone on a better way to work my way through the string?