New for substrings with accented letters May I have created TemplateStrindexgetchar and TemplateSubstrany to also handle any of those dozens of accented letters and ligatures Since the character comparison is done in a MediaWiki switchexpression there would be almost no performance impact in adding switchcases for accented letters to be added onto the end of the list A switchexpression since January  exits upon the first match and does not compare the remaining letters in the list  substranyXYZ   returns  letters  as too short for  TemplateStrindexgetchar can be updated to match more accented letters or other special characters as needed for future use