Operations on text chunks are much faster if you put the contents of the field or text member into a string variable and operate on that rather than on the field or text member itself. For example:

on oneMethod

SetPosition(0)

repeat while firstChar > 0

set firstChar = FindNext(field "someField","cat")

if char(firstChar + 3) of field "someField" = " " then

ReplaceNext(field "someField","cat","dog")

end if

end repeat

end

on fasterMethod

set temp = field "someField"

SetPosition(0)

repeat while firstChar > 0

set firstChar = FindNext(temp,"cat")

if char(firstChar + 3) of temp = " " then

ReplaceNext(temp,"cat","dog")

end if

end repeat

put temp into field "someField"

end

When you pass a large string variable as the argument to a handler, Lingo has to make a copy of the string variable which can really slow things down. If it is a very large string and you don't have enough memory to make the copy, Director might even crash. In such a case it is faster to store the large string in a global and let the handler operate directly on the global. If you are familiar with behaviors, you can accomplish the same thing by storing the string once as a property variable that you reference from the behavior's handlers.

on oneMethod findString,hugeSearchString

if FindFirst(hugeSearchString,findString) > 0 then

return TRUE

else

return FALSE

end if

end

on fasterSaferMethod findString

global hugeSearchString

if FindFirst(hugeSearchString,findString) > 0 then

return TRUE

else

return FALSE

end if

end