Can someone tell me...

Gotcha! thanks for the reply...

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[Michael Mattias]

Under Windows, many functions require a pre-initialized string, which means the string must have a length. The only way to give a string a length is to assign some characters to it. SPACE$ is handy.

(There could be a long, drawn-out technical explanation of memory allocation and the local process workspace here, but it would put at least one of us to sleep. Just stick with the above).

MCM

Hello all!

Can someone tell me why so many people use SPACE$ to presize a string before a file GET or TCP RECV? Am I really supposed to do that or is this done "just in case"? If the GET/TCP RECV calls return a string of a given size then why would you need to presize the string?

buffer = space$(len(datablock))
get hfile,,buffer

or

buffer = space$(len(datablock))
tcp recv hsock, len(datablock), buffer

Cheers!