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copied!<p>Since you said that <code>texte</code> and <code>texteTotal</code> are strings, I have a couple of suggestions:</p> <p><strong>1. Always concatenate strings with the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/kd1e4aey%28v=VS.85%29.aspx" rel="nofollow"><code>&</code> operator</a>.</strong></p> <ul> In VBScript, there are two ways to concatenate (add together) two string variables: the & operator and the + operator. The + operator is normally used to add together two numeric values, but is retained for backwards compatibility with older versions of BASIC that did not have the & operator for strings. Because the & operator is available in VBScript, it is recommended that you always prefer using it to concatenate strings and reserve the + for adding together numeric values. This won't necessarily provide any speed increase, but it eliminates any ambiguity in your code and makes clear your original intention. This is especially important in VBScript where you're working with Variants. When you use the + operator on a string that may contain numeric values, you have no way of knowing whether it will add the two numeric values together or combine the two strings. </ul> <p><strong>2. Remember that string concatenation in VBScript has tremendous overhead and is very inefficient.</strong></p> <ul> Unlike VB.NET and Java, VBScript does not have a StringBuilder class to aid in the creation of large strings. Instead, whenever you repeatedly add things to the end of a string variable, VB will repeatedly copy that variable over and over again. When you're building a string in a loop like you do in the above code, this can really degrade performance as VB constantly allocates space for the new string variable and performs a copy. With each iteration of the loop, the concatenation becomes slower and slower (in geek-speak, you're dealing with an n² algorithm, where n = the number of concatenations). The problem gets even worse if the string exceeds 64K in size. VB can store small strings in a 64K cache, but if a string becomes larger than the cache, performance drops even more. This kind of thing is of course invisible to the programmer for simplicity, but if you're concerned about optimization, it's something to understand is happening in the background. <br><br> In light of the above information, let's revisit the two code samples that you posted. You said that `texte` is "not very big but there are hundreds [of] thousands [of] lines." That means you may easily run out of space in the 64K string cache, and eventually you may even run out of space in the RAM allocated to the script. The limit varies, but you can eventually get "Out of Memory" errors, depending on how large your string grows. Even if you're not anywhere near that point now, it's worth considering for the future. If someone goes back later to add functionality to the script, will they remember or bother to change the string concatenation algorithm? Probably not. <br><br> To prevent any "Out of Memory" errors from cropping up, you can simply stop keeping the text string in RAM and write it directly to a file instead. This makes even more sense in your case because that's what you're eventually going to do with the string anyway! <b>Why waste CPU cycles and space in memory by continually allocating and reallocating new string variables for each iteration of the loop when you could just write the value to the file and forget about it? I'd say that your first code sample is the simplest and preferred method to accomplish what you want.</b> <br><br> The only time that I would consider the second method is if you were dealing with file I/O that was extremely inefficient, such as a disk being accessed over a network connection. As long as you're writing to a local disk, you're not going to have any performance problems here. The other concern, pointed out by @astander, is that the first method leaves the file you're writing to open for a long period of time, placing a lock on that resource. While this is an important concern, I think its implication for your application is minimal, as I assume that you're creating and writing to your own private file that no other application is expected to be able to access. <br><br> However, despite my recommendation, the first method is still not the most optimized and efficient way to concatenate strings. The <i>best</i> way would be a VBScript implementation of a StringBuilder class that stores the string in memory in an array of bytes as it is created. Periodically, as you add text to the string, the concatenation class would allocate more space to the array to hold the additional text. This would be much faster than the native VBScript implementation of string concatenation because it would perform these reallocations far less often. Additionally, as the string you're building in memory grows larger, your StringBuilder class could flush the contents of the string in memory to the file, and start over with an empty string. You could use something like Francesco Balena's CString class (<a href="http://www.vbcode.com/asp/showsn.asp?theID=415" rel="nofollow">http://www.vbcode.com/asp/showsn.asp?theID=415</a>), or Microsoft's example (complete with some benchmarks and a further explanation) available here: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/170964" rel="nofollow">http://support.microsoft.com/kb/170964</a>. </ul>

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