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 XYZ 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