[sergeevik]

substr / leftPad / rightPad. Performed String.intern() on each input string. This is a slow lookup in the JVM's global string table, which also clutters it with strings from user data, and the result is used only for calculating code points.

[aeberhart]

Thanks, looks good. The interned strings are only used for code point counting, so nothing depends on identity.

Note for future changes to substr / leftPad / rightPad: this code originally comes from Jsonata4Java, which is likely no longer maintained, so we have to clean it up here. If we touch these functions again, the following should be addressed as well:

• Objects.requireNonNull(...) is now redundant: str and padStr are already null-checked in the pad functions, and substr calls str.length() before it.
• The padding in leftPad / rightPad is built with String += in a loop, which is quadratic in the pad length. StringBuilder or String.repeat would be better.