Thank you very much for this really interesting benchmark, thanos1983, I knew that substr was likely to be faster than a regex for that type of case, but I never thought about using ord for that and did not imagine it would be so significantly faster. I still have to figure out whether it makes a significant difference in my use cases (typically reading a very large file and discarding a sizable fraction of its lines), but I might make good use of that to enhance the performance of some of my programs.