Depends on how your parsing. I suspect your tokenating. So every time you tokenate the search begins back at 0. If you tokenate your self by actively tracking your current character position. compare until next comma then you can save time. But otherwise your going to lose performance.
So as an example
mega, super, fun happy, time
If you for some reason need time
while(word != "time")
word = tokenate( srtring, loopindex, ",")
**** let's ignore the permanent stuck loop this would require.
anyway this would search through your string 5 times to find time. What the system has to do is create a string for eaching parsing into a word. So the system is going to create an array every tick. then destroy the array. So your asking for an array to be created an destroyed.
Where as if you broke it into an array at the start of layout you could just do
array.find("time")
and then avoid creating a tokenized array at the beginning of the layout.
now however if you instead did
if( string.find("time") )
then that would be faster than tokenized parsing.
Where as in an array. once you compare the first you move on to the second.