I suppose for plain text files, converting the encoding from extended ASCII (aka 8-bit) to regular ASCII (7-bit) is worthwhile if one really wants to pursue this type of worthwhile.
Although in retrospect you can get even higher speedups by condensing the character encoding table down to A-z and 0-9 and omitting quite a few of the ASCII characters from the lookup table.
Although in retrospect you can get even higher speedups by condensing the character encoding table down to A-z and 0-9 and omitting quite a few of the ASCII characters from the lookup table.