counting consecutive null characters

[nuzzle]

I suppose for forward iterators you're stuck looking at everything anyway, so you may as well do a simpler algorithm. Bidirectional would depend on the relative speed of conditionals versus traversal. It's a good optimization for random access iterators though.

I'm not sure you understand the beauty of the algorithm I suggested. If you did why are you so preoccupied with the choise of iterators? It's just a technicality.

My suggestion, which now seems to be called the "jump algorithm" in this thread, increases the performance of the native approach (where every byte is checked) many times. But I can't take much credit for it because as laserlight noted, it's probably just a special case of the Boyer-Moore algorithm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E...arch_algorithm