Yes, I had considered setting up alternatives that pass an array to chomp and chop, but figured it wasn't going to be a very useful comparison for this specific situation. But absolutely, pushing the loop into internals is going to be a lot faster. In fact it wouldn't have surprised me if you had said that the array version was even faster than the 'nada' version, since the 'nada' version still has a loop, unless it's been optimized away, which I'm not sure on.