If I ignore your text and look at your code, it appears you are trying to reformat each 2.5 8-bit characters as one 20-bit code point in order to reduce the number of 'characters' in your string. Thi...
Just be sure to always mount a scratch monkey.
The cake is a lie....
monkey punching - made my day and I think I might have to conflate this term myself. LOL....
Because this node will show up if someone searches for "printing to stdin doesn't show up", which is indeed related to my answer....
For computational efficiency, you'll want to use an "iterator" pattern. Search here, there are quite a few interesting posts about this. You can also read about them in [https://hop.perl.plover.com/bo...