LC 7.03 ff Crashing on larger text blocks

[R.H.]

I am trying in varying ways to process large chunks of text data, actually
in this current application trying to read my Gmail contact data (cvs
export) and converting such data to lists / arrays.

Using lists I want to exchange commas and returns inside quoted text and
keep records as lines to be able to import to Excel or do whatever.

Using either a "repeat for" or "repeat with" loop, using replaceTex(),
offset() or simply going through each characters and changing one or the
other character .... whatever I do, LiveCode fails operating and crashes
after processing part of the data.

I tried other versions of 7. I need UTF-8 character encoding, so going to
6.x is not an option.

Nothing helps. It crashes and crashes.

Trying to understand when what is happening, I multiplied step by step
thousands and then millions of times a line of 50-100 commas and tried
replacing this list with semikolons using any of the methods available -
but it crashes.

Also going through it line by line, adding lines to another text variable,
or whatever I do, the same happens.

LiveCode 7 ff obviously runs into a memory problem.

Maybe there is a work-around I did not yet recognize?

I already have filed a bug report first seeing this behaviour with the
replacetext() function. But it happens whatever processing is done on such
largers text blocks.

Roland