I am striking this whole post as this didn't work out very well. Somehow the main point just got completely lost. Perl is not a great character by character language and its just not the right way to use Perl, but somehow I wasn't able to get this across. Oooops. Yes. You are correct!!.

This whole thread is a bit weird as the idea of processing a char at a time is sort of "anti-Perl".

 The code should be: while (my $var =shift @string){} But that makes no difference. 

                 Rate    Split    Substr pre_splitted    Shift
Split          8851/s       --      -73%         -94%     -98%
Substr        32226/s     264%        --         -80%     -95%
pre_splitted 158028/s    1685%      390%           --     -73%
Shift        587199/s    6534%     1722%         272%      --

[download]

The main point is that shift() is very, very fast, but Perl will work with regex even faster. I mean so what do you do with these chars that were read individually?

Update: Well Darn! the code above is not right, and I think I could write some faster "get a character" code, but that is just not the point at all!

In reply to Re^3: How to access each char in a string most quickly? by Marshall
in thread How to access each char in a string most quickly? by llancet

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