Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!uwvax!oddjob!hao!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ANDREW.CMU.EDU!kc24+ From: kc24+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Keith Alexander Chapman) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: Appearance of control characters during string manipulations Message-ID: Date: 22 Feb 88 02:02:45 GMT References: <8802212019.aa25040@SMOKE.BRL.ARPA> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 16 It's vaguely possible that the problem is related to using up all the free memory. As you may or may not know, string manipulations waste space incredibly. To help limit this, Applesoft (which I assume you're using) has the function FRE(arg) which not only returns the number of bytes available for more variables, etc., but also cleans up the garbage that string manipulation can cause. If you insert a line like 120 GARBAGE = FRE(0) somewhere in the loop that works with the strings, the garbage will be periodically cleaned and not cause any problems. I don't know how the problem could have been caused by this, since you usually just get an error message about having run out of free memory, but with Applesoft, you never can tell. Prometheus