Yea, the piece of cloth would be a G-String. Very different. I like doing the memory block management in the Xojo app. I was using the C program to create the memory and wondered when and how I would free it so I dont create a memory leak. Im setting up the Xojo app as a web service which will parse the key value response and JSONize it and return it to the caller. Passing a pointer to memory effectively updating a parameter by reference sounds like a good plan. I expect msgbox will still be unhappy if if tell it to display the CString and there are undisplayable characters in there…but I can deal with that if I have the raw bytes in a memory block.