Hey thanks for the suggestions. One thing that I found is that testing both strings for null actually performs faster because you may have parameters of different lengths and bailing on the null character of the shortest is ideal. And actually testing for an ampersand would probably bail even earlier in cases of duplicate params.

And maybe you can shed some light on this. I am a fan of the while loop too, but I found the for loop to be more performant. Is it possible that there are optimizations for variables touched in the for(;;) definition that do not exist for the while() definition?