This code, introduced in 8c0a7eeda06d, was intentionally over-reading
an input string to avoid getting a shared string object for a one-byte
input. Unfortunately with an empty input (like in the case of a fuzzer
getting started) this was a trivial over-read and triggered an
AddressSanitizer failure.
I went out of my way to make sure the code still does the
copy-avoidance tricks. I don't think this change will cost us much
performance since the one-character strings should be cached
aggressively anyway.