Working with a giant quantity of characters

[Ghaleon]

Hi Guys !!

I have something like this, inside a loop:

Dim strContentHolder     As String
Dim strIncomingContent   As String
strContentHolder = strContentHolder + strIncomingContent

Let's talk about the problem I'm facing:
As the title says, the strContentHolder that is inside a loop, so the code above will happens a lot of times, like 200x or more... So the memory consumed will be too much, and the error will happen, Out Of String Space.

I tried to download and use csStringBuilder, an implemented class that would work like StringBuilder, but the error still happening. So I'd like to ask you guys, what could I do to work arround this ? I tried to work more than one string, like, strContentHolder2 strContentHolder3 [...]. But it was too much content u.u

[Killer42]

There are a few things you might consider. For example...

• The scope of the variables. I've had cases where changing something from private (module/form) scope to public, or possibly the other way around, got around a similar limitation.
• According to this MS page, you should try assigning to a variable with a different name. And then assigning back to the original variable, I guess (though they don't say that). However, from what you said about trying multiple variables, this might not work.
• It might not be a string space problem at all. It probably is, of course. But according to one of the responses in this thread it could be something else masquerading as a string space error. Just how "giant" are we talking about here?
• Could you build a byte array rather than a string? Depending on what you want to do with it, this may not be convenient. On the other hand, it might work.
• Must you keep it all in memory? What about writing the text out to a file, and retrieving it as needed? After all, no matter how clever you get with the code, memory is not infinite - it will fill up eventually.