First draft of a string iterator has been committed. This is currently only used by the hash_string_equal function; usage will be extended shortly to other character loops.
Performance enhancement ended up less than preliminary tests indicated, but anything is better than nothing! The hash-utf8 benchmark went from approx. 4.01/5.88 seconds to 3.97/5.31 seconds on my system. The behaviour of the decode_and_advance functions in the various encodings still needs proper testing; this will follow during the weekend. Regards Peter Gibbs EmKel Systems
