*blush* I've always been fond of this little piece of code :)

Anyway, here's the lowdown: for situations where I want to replace text tags in form templates, this is a great hack. For the task that made me wonder if it might be inefficient, it proved to be the Wrong Tool. Doing the translation from Mac euro-characters to their Windows code page equivalents is definitely a

tr///

job. Crude benchmarks suggest an enormous difference: less than a second for a translation that used to take almost a minute.

Your humble supplicant is most pleased with the wisdom imparted by the Monks :)