# Objective
All delimiter symbols used by the path parser are ASCII, this means we
can entirely ignore UTF8 handling. This may improve performance.
## Solution
Instead of storing the path as an `&str` + the parser offset, and
reading the path using `&self.path[self.offset..]`, we store the parser
state in a `&[u8]`. This allows two optimizations:
1. Avoid UTF8 checking on `&self.path[self.offset..]`
2. Avoid any kind of bound checking, since the length of what is left to
read is stored in the `&[u8]`'s reference metadata, and is assumed valid
by the compiler.
This is a major improvement when comparing to the previous parser.
1. `access_following` and `next_token` now inline in `PathParser::next`
2. Benchmarking show a 20% performance increase (#9364)
Please note that while we ignore UTF-8 handling, **utf-8 is still
supported**. This is because we only handle "at the edges" what happens
exactly before and after a recognized `SYMBOL`. utf-8 is handled
transparently beyond that.
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