String processing is just one of those things you can't offload to a second process. Having Perl in the same box doesn't mean you have the luxury to open some I

String processing is just one of those things you can't offload to a second process. Having Perl in the same box doesn't mean you have the luxury to open some IPC channel and pass your texts to Perl. String processing is one of those types of problems that just benefit from a little thought and 10 seconds of planning. C itself is bogged down by its own horrible string representation, the nul termination, where most operations need to traverse the string up to the terminator before they know where it ends. This causes all sorts of horrible buffering tricks, conditional tests on every character, and other unpleasant things. Pascal had length-prefixed strings from day one, and DJB created Netstrings to make network programming easier on people. See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeasedString http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeasedString