Scan ***, **, or * and return number scanned, or 0. Advances position.

Try to process a backtick code span that began with a span of ticks of length openticklength length (already parsed). Return 0 if you don't find matc

** Allocate a new porter tokenizer. Return a pointer to the new ** tokenizer in *ppModule */

Take characters while a predicate holds, and return a string.

Validate a single UTF-8 character according to RFC 3629.

Return the sample variance of data. data should be an iterable of Real-valued numbers, with at least two values. The optional argument xbar,

* Public functions */