On Thu, 20 Sep 2001 09:13:18 +1000, Shane Stanley
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>On 20/9/01 2:41 AM +1000, Paul Berkowitz, [log in to unmask], wrote:
>
>> OK, thanks Mark. I know that 30K or so is the max per variable to write in
>> at a time
>
>You can deal in bigger chunks than that -- it's just a question of memory.
>You can store a string of more than 32KB in a variable, and you can
>concatenate strings greater than 32KB. You can also extract parts of long
>strings using "character x of y", "paragraph x of y" and "text item x of y".
>
>But you can't get "word x of y" if y is longer than 32KB, and you can't use
>strings longer than 32KB in comparisons.

>=========================================================================

Hi, all -

I may be up against one of the string limits or variable limits discussed
long ago in the macscrpt archives, but I've gotten fuzzy on what to watch
out for, and the archives don't seem to address the question clearly enough
for me to grasp.

I've generated a list of strings, some of them a few thousand characters,
from a FMP database, using "set stringList to cell "text" of every record".
I'm cleaning up the text to convert to html, using Acme Script Widgets to
replace illegal characters with escape characters. 

The script usually works an smaller sets of records, but as soon as I run it
on 50 or more records, it hangs and times out. I suspect it's either the
total size of the contents of the variable, or the string length of one of
the records. 

Can somebody help me understand these limits so I can accomplish the task in
more manageable chunks?

WES