Newbie: String concatenation limited to 256 characters?

Hello,
I have written a small script that parses an (ugly) HTML file line by
line and converts the relevant information to CSV. During parsing, I
heavily use string concatenation to glue together parts of text that
belong together (but might be separated in the original file by tags
or newlines). In the code, the expression
$oldstring = $oldstring.$newstring
occurs very often.
Frequently, the strings get longer than 256 characters. At this point,
the string concatenation refuses to add anything to $oldstring. How is
it possible to avoid that?
Thanks in advance for answers on  a (maybe very newbish) question
Piet

Piet wrote:
> In the code, the expression
> $oldstring = $oldstring.$newstring
> occurs very often.
> Frequently, the strings get longer than 256 characters. At this point,
> the string concatenation refuses to add anything to $oldstring.

That's a bunch of baloney.  Perl has no problem with large strings.

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\jms>perl -le "for($_='a';;$_=$_.$_){print length}"
1
2
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1024
2048
4096
8192
16384
32768
65536
131072
262144
524288
1048576
2097152
4194304
8388608
16777216
33554432
67108864
...
-Joe

pit.grinja@gmx.de (Piet) wrote in message news:<39cbe663.0409290921.1f67d3f9@posting.google
.com>...
> Hello,
> I have written a small script that parses an (ugly) HTML file line by
> line and converts the relevant information to CSV. During parsing, I
> heavily use string concatenation to glue together parts of text that
> belong together (but might be separated in the original file by tags
> or newlines). In the code, the expression
> $oldstring = $oldstring.$newstring
> occurs very often.
> Frequently, the strings get longer than 256 characters. At this point,
> the string concatenation refuses to add anything to $oldstring. How is
> it possible to avoid that?
> Thanks in advance for answers on  a (maybe very newbish) question
Thanks for all your comments. In fact, the problem was, of course, NOT
perl. How could it... My fault was that I didnīt check the original
text output file of the parsing, only the contents that survived
importing the text file into M$e...l.
I apologize for that.
Piet