My apologizes if I am bringing up a topic that has been discussed before, this is my first time wading into the PHP developers lists and I couldn't find anything particularly relevant with the search.
Here is a bug I submitted over the weekend ( http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=54387) with an attached patch that adds a str_slice() function into PHP. This function is just a very simple string slicing function, with the logical interface of str_slice(string, start, [end]). It is of course meant to replace substr() as an interface for string slicing. I detailed the reasons I submitted the patch in the bug a little bit, but the main reason is that I think the substr() function is really overly confusing and just not an intuitive method of string slicing, which is exceedingly common functionality. I realize we don't want to go around adding lots of random little functions into the language that don't offer much, but the problem with that is that if we have a function like substr() with an unusual and unintuitive interface, it becomes unchangeable due to legacy issues and then you can never improve. I think this particular functionality is important enough to offer an updated interface. In the bug I also pointed to two related bugs that would be essentially fixed with this patch. -Dan
