new for substrings with accented letters may 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 exits upon the first match and does not compare the remaining letters in the list substr any xyz returns letters as too short for template str index getchar can be updated to match more accented letters or other special characters as needed for future use