I like to use sprintf whenever possible, to stitch strings together.

Well, that begs for a web service! Create a JSON document from all of the strings that should be concatinated, encoded in base64, wrap that - uuencoded - into an XML file, and post that via SOAP to the web service. The web service should reply with a JSON document containing a base64 encoded XML document that contains the resulting string uuencoded. That way, you can waste even more CPU cycles.

Why don't you just use the concat operator "." or join?

Alexander