The first question should be whether 8 seconds is too long in the first place.
That is indeed the question, because those 8 seconds are for testdata of 724MB, that is: a processing speed of about 100MB/second. Since the text would appear to be marked up text from a wiki or similar, I doubt the strings would ever be longer than 30kBytes. And then, the task is done in a fraction of a millisecond.

In reply to Re^4: Remove double bracket and singe quotes by bart
in thread Remove double bracket and singe quotes by lobs

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