I think your focus entirely on shortness is a bit misguided. If that's your goal, you should give up and just use Perl or similar. But of course that isn't you're entire goal, so you're being (unintentionally) misleading. I'm sure a goal isn't inconsistency like this.
Perl programs for doing common things to strings are short in characters. They're not so short in tokens. But more importantly, Perl doesn't have the kind of brevity you can get from having macros.
