RE: Testing for presence of alphabetical characters

> I've heard that string-length() can get expensive because of
> multi-byte characters, although I would've thought translate()
> sufferered from the same problem...

I think few people are likely to notice the difference, but it is worth
being aware that string-length() might take linear time rather than constant
time because of the need to look for surrogate pairs. Of course this is very
implementation-dependent.

However, if you're testing the result of a translate() operation, I would
think that the cost of calling string-length() is almost certainly less than
the cost of calling translate().

Michael Kay