I do appreciate all of your suggestions. In my case, speed is no issue. It's a one-off script that, once the job is done, will not be needed again. If it took all night or even three days to process, I wouldn't mind...so long as it was correctly completed (it should finish in just a few minutes, though). Furthermore, it's not running on English...which is one reason I gave a hypothetical example here. It's running on an Asian language, full of HTML-entity-style character codes which I'm converting to UTF8, among other things.

Yes, I'm a polyglot. :)