It would seem more efficient to capture and replace only those character sequences needing translation.

Well, no, actually - not in this case. The OP is transliterating from a "Romanized" (Latin-alphabet-based) "transcription" into Cyrillic. All characters in a given string will need to be replaced, because Cyrillic has its own dedicated "page" within the Unicode table. The incoming Latin characters (and diacritic marks) may come from the ASCII table or somewhere else, but when the transliteration is finished, every character will have been replaced.

In reply to Re^2: Transliteration inside an XML file by graff
in thread Transliteration inside an XML file by nikop

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