I've run into a kind of surprising limitation(?) and it has me stumped.  Maybe someone else here has done something similiar?


**The Problem**

I am attempting to use TclCurl to have a "conversation" with an ASP driven webpage.  A little background... these are corporate in-house webpages over a VPN and there is little to no hope of getting them to change anything.  And there is a major design flaw in these webpages - the designer has decided to use the __VIEWSTATE field to save state for everything... '''including''' the kitchen sink! The result... 

The stumbling block is a __VIEWSTATE field that is approximately 500K large!  To communicate with the server, I have to capture this awful chunk of data and send it back in the POST request.  I have code that does this, and I know that it works because it is heavily tested on pages with a sane-sized __VIEWSTATE.  Trying to work with these pages, however, just causes TCL to hang.  


***Possible Cause***

I have no problem reading a file megabytes large into a variable, so somothing else is going on here.  I looked for "offensive" characters that may be choking the interpreter but none seem to exit.  The strking detail seems to to me to be the absense of newlines.  The ~500K is all on one line...   could it be that TCL cannot handle this scenario, or handle it well?



****Things I've Tried and The Outcome****


   1. I've taken a chunk of about 10K and tried building a 500K string with no newlines using '''append'''.  The interpreter does get slower and slower and eventually grinds to a halt.  When doing this with newlines, no slowdown occurs.  


   2. I've tried every possible method of reading this data into a variable...
        
       * different encodings and translations on fconfigure -> read into variable
       * set variable directly using copy/paste into console
       * breaking up into chunks and rebuilding these chunks into one variable 


   3. I've looked for a way to have TclCurl pull the postfields from a file.  No such method seems to exist - it must come from a variable.


   4. I've tried using external options like CMD.exe type ''filename''.  Same problem.  Interestingly, CMD.exe has no problem typing this file out in a CMD.exe instance.


*****Questions*****



   1. Why can't TCL handle this data?

   2. What can I do?  Anyone have any suggestions or similiar experience?