Similarly to what was done in get_csv, we optimize he use of get_char and unget_char. I see a 7.5% speed improvement in a simple benchmark of the awk macro with the record separator rs set to #/\n/. * regex.c (scan_until_common): Obtain the strm_ops operations of the stream, and pull the low level get_char and unget_char virtual operations from it. Call these directly in the loop. Thereby, we avoid all the type checking overhead in these functions.