New for substrings with accented letters
07-May-2010: I have created Template:Str_index/getchar (and Template:Substr_any) to also handle any of those dozens of accented letters and ligatures. Since the character comparison is done in a MediaWiki switch-expression, there would be almost no performance impact in adding switch-cases (for accented letters) to be added onto the end of the list. A switch-expression (since January 2008) exits upon the first match, and does not compare the remaining letters in the list.
 {{substr_any|XYZÈèĖėÇç |5|10}}  returns 4 letters "" as too short for 10.
Template:Str_index/getchar can be updated to match more accented letters or other special characters, as needed for future use. -