>>However I never found VFP's string handling fast. It uses things like
>>handles to memory locations. If you do like in your code :
>

lcXML = lcXML + someaddition

>>Adding over and over to same variable is not optimized at all. However
>>that code might be optimized in different ways (in VFP there are at least
>>3 ways:).
>
>Actually, there is some optimization going on in that case. Unfortunately, it can cause the code to break in recursive cases. To avoid the optimization _IF_ you are hitting this problem, change it to read:
>
>

lcXML = "" + lcXML + someaddition

Garrett, can you expand on this a bit more please? Why is this faster?