While Erlang is not the first choice one would make for heavy string processing, in most web apps you are doing far less string processing than people assume.

While Erlang is not the first choice one would make for heavy string processing, in most web apps you are doing far less string processing than people assume. For an Erlang solution you just keep the "string" as an Erlang binary and pass it around in this raw form. With the addition of unicode to the list of types that are available for processing with the Erlang binary datatype in the recent R13 release this option is becoming more interesting.