Filter by Item and What gives with my field?

[Tom Cole]

Dear Group,

I have two items that I hope someone can help on. One is very  
straightforward: I need to filter a field by the items.
That is, I have a field with zillions of records with four items  
(comma delimited)

itemone,itemtwo,itemthree,itemfour

I want itemfour to disappear after I put the field into a variable.  
The problem is that item four is never the same, so I can't filter by  
a specific string. I'm sure there must be a way to just have all of  
item four go poof.

Second, I have a field that is full of TAB delimited records like this:

Southern Arizona Trip TAB 5/27/1973 TAB This was the trip when we got  
two flat tires in the middle of nowhere.

Just three items each. Sometimes, however, item three is a whole ten- 
page essay with paragraph returns but no tabs of course.

When I pasted all of these records in a field, not everything appears  
there if you scroll through it. However, if you script: answer fld  
journal, you see the complete version. If you copy the journal field  
to the clipboard it is also complete. But you cannot SEARCH the field  
for the things in it because they're hidden. Is there some field  
property that is truncating the field in various places? I feel that I  
am back to hypercard with the 30,000 character limit. What gives?

I want to see all of the stuff I wrote without copying it and pasting  
it somewhere. It's so strange to see only a small part of what you  
wrote and then to copy the text and find that it is, indeed, there.

Thanks,
Tom