I am saying that getting a character quickly in and of itself is meaningless.

getc() will do that. There are some ways to get arrays of characters and process them efficiently.

At the end of the day, you aren't asking "how do I read single characters efficiently?, you want to ask a much broader application question, but you haven't done it yet.

Your question doesn't have any apparent connection to your intended application.

Udate: it appears to me that you need to find patterns amongst very long strings. Generating a list of 1,200 chars is not going to help you achieve this objective. getc() is NOT the way. Perl excels at processing sequences of characters, not individual characters.