METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PROCESSING CHARACTER STREAMS

An embodiment is a method for processing a character stream including: (a) forming, responsive to the character stream, a plurality of parallel property bit streams wherein each of the parallel property bit streams includes bit values of a particular property associated with data values of the character stream; and (b) processing the parallel property bit streams. For example, the method applies to character streams encoded in accordance with fixed-width character encoding schemes, for example, ASCII, or variable length character encoding schemes, for example, UTF-8.