There is no great difference between the old and new code for text
encodings which either 1) use a fixed number of bytes per codepoint or
2) for which we have an 'mblen' table which enables us to find the
length of a multi-byte character using a table lookup indexed by the
first byte value.
The big difference is for other text encodings, where we have to
actually decode the string to split it. For such text encodings,
such as ISO-2022-JP and UTF-16, I measured a speedup of 50%-120% over
the previous implementation.
Alex Dowad