>>>
>>>Jim,
>>>
>>>There's no such thing as memory allocated for variables. VFP allocates it dynamically. That's why you can read file more that 16Gb in size into memory using FILETOSTR() function if you've enough memory.
>>
>>Just to clarify: this is actually 16 MB, to be more precise 16,777,184 characters.
>
>That's what help says but you can read bigger file if you've enough memory.

While you can manipulate bigger (even gigabyte) file sizes with FILETOSTR(), there are apparently some good reasons in limitation declared in Help. I did not do a lot of tests with all string functions and huge string variables, but in those I did (as string concatenation, for example) many of them failed with "string is too long to fit" error message. In my tests it was with 16.7 Mb size, then around 29 Mb (seemed to depend on the size of string variables I manipulated).

So, I see 16.7 Mb as a string variable size that is supported for all possible string manipulation functions, no matter if some of them are capable of handling bigger sizes.