Can you do it faster??

[Lord Orwell]

This isn't true in VB6. Smaller code usually means you are using built-in functions, for example Split, to keep your code short. With longer code that I write (and it is often the longest solution) I do a lot of small tweaking, which results in a long code. But it is often the fastest as well.

The world of .NET may be a lot different though, as they probably have optimized a lot of the functions. In VB6 only a few built-in functions have been truly optimized for speed.

my first idea was to convert to a byte array and work with it that way, but you had already done that and i didn't want to rehash your work.