guh !  Looking at the actual code, these descriptions are wildly wrong anyway.  The string is split on lines; each line is then split on a separator specified as a parameter to the function, assigning fragments into an array with two indices; the second is just an index along the line; the first is either line number (for parsestringarrayidx) or (in all other cases) the first word on the line (and its [0] is itself, i.e. var[x][0] is x).  In the latter case, a later line starting with the same word shall blot out entries from the earlier line.  The functions return the number of lines read (which, in the blotted case, may be more than the number of first indices in use).  Or at least, that's what I think the code does ... now to go in search of its public documentation ...