Huge array of variable length strings

[mdijkens]

I have some ideas but it depends on the application.

Questions:
 
           What do these strings represent (Files,  A text buffer in an editor,  ??  etc)

            Why do you want to load them all at once ?

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I'm thinking a more 'C' like approach where your array is actually an array of pointers then you write a couple of SUBS to allocate and deallocate _MEM for each pointer.

Then a Cleanup SUB to free all the _MEM's

I'm reading the contents of a directory with files to do a lot of searches on this content and report back which files have matches
Search terms are not known upfront but depend on content/dependencies of these files, so I can't do the searches file by file...

I am also thinking of an array of pointers to one big _Mem that I load all contents in, but I'm also curious what 'normal' variable structures can hold the biggest set of variable length strings?
Are there max size differences between variable/fixed length, arrays, shared/no-shared, dynamic/static, user defined types, etc...