Fabio,

Your two requests of the functions are not exactly equivalent.

occurs() must always scan the entire string to find and count the total number of occurances in the target string.

at(,,n) can stop its scan of the string as soon as it finds the Nth occurance.

If you are unhappy with the performance of any given VFP string function, there are two articles on my website showing how you can call C++ code from VFP. Both examples perform the task between 2 times as fast as VFP and several orders of magnitude faster than VFP.

>Normally one believes that the string functions of VFP are much fast;
>this is correct, but it is not a general rule.
>In this example, it comes used OCCURS() and AT in order to obtain the same information:
>One string appears more than N times in an other string.
>
>If the routines of AT and OCCURS they were both written best,
>time for execute the request would have to be practically identical.
>
>Instead the difference is of 10x 15x (1000% - 1500%)
>
>Example code for N=19
>

>sString = ''
>FOR J=1 TO 20
>sString = m.sString +','+REPLICATE('a',100)
>NEXT
>? 'Lenght = ',LEN(m.sString)
>t1=SECONDS()
>FOR k=1 TO 50000
>  =OCCURS(",",m.sString)>19
>NEXT
>? "OCCURS",SECONDS()-t1
>t1=SECONDS()
>FOR k=1 TO 50000
>  =AT(",",m.sString,20)>0
>NEXT
>? "AT",SECONDS()-t1
>

>
>Then, exist native VFP command that C++ can speedup.
>
>Fabio