memory - Out of String Space in Visual Basic 6

Question

We are getting an error in a VB6 application that sends data back and forth over TCP sockets. We get a runtime error "out of string space". Has anyone seen this or have any thoughts on why this would happen? It seems like we are hitting some VB6 threshhold so any other thoughts would be helpful as well.

Answer 1

As others have pointed out, every string concatenation in VB will allocate a new string and then copy the data over and then de-allocate the original once it can. In a loop this can cause issues.

To work around this you can create a simple StringBuilder class like this one:

Option Explicit

Private data As String
Private allocLen As Long
Private currentPos As Long

Public Function Text() As String
  Text = Left(data, currentPos)
End Function

Public Function Length() As Long
  Length = currentPos
End Function

Public Sub Add(s As String)

  Dim newLen As Long
  newLen = Len(s)
  If ((currentPos + newLen) > allocLen) Then
    data = data & Space((currentPos + newLen))
    allocLen = Len(data)
  End If

  Mid(data, currentPos + 1, newLen) = s
  currentPos = currentPos + newLen

End Sub

Private Sub Class_Initialize()
  data = Space(10240)
  allocLen = Len(data)
  currentPos = 1
End Sub

This class will minimize the number of string allocations by forcing the string to be built with spaces in it and then overwriting the spaces as needed. It re-allocates to roughly double its size when it finds that it does not have enough space pre-initialized. The Text method will return the portion of the string that is actually used.