NK> I am curently writing a program which speed is of the ut-most
 NK> importance. But apart from that I need to be able to access
 NK> each char of a string at a time efficently. At the moment I am
 NK> using a array of char but I still have processes which only a
 NK> string can handle. As you know strings and arrays are not
 NK> compatable. One way but not both.

  The way I got around this was to use null-terminated strings and
pointers, which is about three-times as fast as manipulating Pascal
strings. If you use a zero-based array (zstr: array[0..255] of char;)
this is compatible with a Pchar pointer and you can use the Strings
Unit in BP7 to do your manipulation - then convert the final array
quickly to a Pascal string with StrPas().

  The basic idea is to allocate your data array into memory, and then
run the pointer along the array to pick out and manipulate the parts
you want, without having to duplicate it unnecessarily.

Regards,
Bob
  
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