The string slicing would have been a lot more efficient had PHP accepted my patch to add this into the PHP core functions :) --> http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=

The string slicing would have been a lot more efficient had PHP accepted my patch to add this into the PHP core functions :) --> http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=54387 http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=54387 In general though we just use these around the code base for general use, and efficiency isn't a concern.