@lemire I'd like to confirm it before making the PR ready for review

I believe the current changes are not covering all cases we've talked about.

In case the character \ is not present, we should just return the string_view instance.
Now if it contains the character \:

1. and encounter " before any \, then we also just return the string_view instance
2. if there is not ", we fallback on the existing code

is it correct?

Let me do some work of my own (next few hours).

Reproducing my comment here:

Here is my current view. We should have a simple/cheap inlined function (which can use NEON/SSE2) equivalent to the following...

std::none_of(s.begin(), s.end(), 
                       [](char c) { 
                        return c == '\\'; });

One thing that @CarlosEduR did not have is that you can call raw_json_token() to get a std::string_view that spans the whole string including the quotes. So all we need to do is call raw_json_token() , then have a fast function check that there is no backslash, and if so we avoid the copy.

Unfortunately the std::none_of thing won't work because compilers cannot be trusted to generate good code. But it is the idea.

Closing this for now.