Hello,
For some reason, I can’t seem to figure out how to find the length of a string in BASIC right now.
I’m currently trying out a few BASIC experiments 
Is there a “faster” way than MID$ to read a single character from a string? I’d like to loop through a string to display it character by character.
No POKEs, CALLs, or PEEKs
Length of a string is LEN(x$) isn’t it?
Thanks,
somehow I missed that command in the manual!
For MID$, no, there isn’t anything else…
And yes, to speed things up: retrieving the string’s storage address via @var (and knowing how it’s encoded), then PEEKing into memory… But you don’t want to go down that road. Even if it’s just reading via PEEK (no CALL/POKE), it makes the code CPC-only.
Hello,
I can say that it has already helped me immensely!
The result so far is looking almost perfect! (haven’t tested it on the original yet)
I can show a picture here — and everything is in motion
However, it will only be presented at the Classic Computing 2026 in Celle (October 10-11)
Looks cool. BTW: I think you should add the Classic Computing 2026 in Celle to events. It might help boosting visibility and attendance 
Thanks for the tip — it looks even more amazing in motion!
I have read another of your post… As this is not assembly langage but BASIC encoding, here is the direct access to a char in BASIC.
10 A$="Texte"
20 AD=@A$:REM AD = Memory adress of A$
30 L=PEEK(AD): REM L = Size of A$ (same as LEN)
40 AD1 = PEEK (AD+1) : REM AD1 = LSB of "Texte"
50 AD2 = PEEK (AD+2) : REM AD2 = MSB of "Texte"
60 TAD = AD2 * 256 + AD1 : REM TAD = Memory adress of "Texte"
70 FOR I=0 TO L-1:PRINT CHR$(PEEK(TAD+I)):NEXT I : REM Prints all chars one by one
It looks so much better in motion!
Ohhh, I have to test it in a “special version” because in this version I don’t want to use peek and poke …
And, at the moment, it looks fast enough with mid$
Like always, if you have computed the address yourself, then accessing one letter is easy as a getting a value after an addition.
With MID$, BASIC is doing the same thing over and over again each time, adding some overhead that can be by-passed with this kind of quick access.
Back in the days, when the only scrolling routine I knew was MID$, I noticed that it was slow while traversing a (long) string/message and would speed up towards the end of it. I wonder if this was due to some inefficient sub-string extraction or just because it had less chars to print when there were only 10, 9, 8 … chars of the long string left. Now I assume it was the latter
Yes, which is why the whole Peek thing is EXTREMELY appealing!
But I just want to move away from “low-level” - towards “what just delivers the basics”.