substr and chop do only one thing, which means they're much faster than regex engine

Also while...=~/(.)/g; is fastest written as  for  split '',...;,

For a sea of benchmarks/topic/"explanations" about these tricks see Re: How to make this substitutions without splitting the strings? (compute not reckon)

In reply to Re^3: Weighted frequency of characters in an array of strings by Anonymous Monk
in thread Weighted frequency of characters in an array of strings by K_Edw

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