Split Large Text Field into several smaller fields

[Fairlight]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 04:12:00PM -0600, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
Mike Schwartz cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
>      Parsing routines are fairly simple to write in only a few lines.  Build
> a loop and use the "mid" function with some variable counters like LE and LF
> in the sample below, using "INSTR" to search for spaces.  Loop through the
> "mid" 200 times and capture the characters. 

That works as long as the original variable/field will contain all the
data.  If it's greater than 32767 bytes worth of data, you'll have to use a
FIFO ring buffer and process the data in chunks, reading in more of the
original each time you run out of original data.  That gets more complex
when you -need- to ensure all of an atomic operation is present in a parse,
and it falls smack across a chunk boundary.  

mark->