[jQuery] Best practice for processing JSON quickly

[René]

I have some JSON that needs processing, e.g.:

   items["1"] =
'101010111110010101020110111110100010101020101020101010101100110100";
   items["2"] =
'000010101210101011100101101010000111111001010121010000111110001111";
   ... (x 1000)

I need to process ~1000 rows so that each 0, 1 or 2 appear as a small
coloured dot. (It's a visualization thing).
So here's what I have so far, which works:



for (i in items) {
   html += process (items[i]);
   }

function process (item) {
        var result = '<div>';
        for (var g=0; g<item.length; g++) {
                switch (item.substr(g,1)) {
                        case "0":
                                result += '<div class="grey">&nbsp;</div>';
                                result;
                        case "1":
                                result += '<div class="blue">&nbsp;</div>';
                                break;
                        case "2":
                                result += '<div class="red">&nbsp;</div>';
                                break;
                        }
                }
        result += '</div>';
        return result;
        }


My question is, is there a faster or more efficient way to iterate
through each items' "10101001010220211"? I realize this is not
strictly jQuery related, but it seems the smartest Javascript people
hang out here. :-)

Thanks

...Rene