I personally believe that judging from its description (I only gave a glance to it) it would indeed work: I saw UTF-8 mentioned and I hope it's customizable, because I clearly need to work on a byte oriented string instead. However an obvious advantage of the module over my poor piece of code is that the former is reasonably tested and thus more likely to be correct: as I already wrote I didn't use a module mainly out of not having thought of doing so...