Tomaz, that was my understanding from the VBA piece you cited yesterday. So presumably it must be something in Pharo-Com which imposes the limits we have seen. I am OK at the moment, because all this work is just an exploration of possibilities; I can wait until you and Pablo have sorted it out. But from the results of your tests, a maximum of 16K in 64-bit systems must be a serious limitation, so something in Pharo-Com needs fixing.

For my immediate work, I shall continue exporting the full text using MailItem.SaveAs; my further processing uses files I have exported manually in this way, so it���s not a problem.

Thanks

Peter Kenny

From: Pharo-users <pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org> On Behalf Of Toma�� Turk
Sent: 08 April 2020 07:58
To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>
Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Automation of MS Office from Pharo

Thanks, Stephane, for the acknowledgement. Peter, as I understand, the limits in COM BSTR data type are defined by the header's length prefix (which is 4 bytes) and software implementatios - for instance, string data type in Visual Basic for Applications is described as "a variable-length string can contain up to approximately 2 billion (2^31) characters", which is in line with the BSTR header. I'm not sure if the OS architecture (32 and 64 bit) influences these values. 

Best wishes,

Tomaz