Currently I'm writing my own load and save script. One of the biggest slow downs is not being able to just read parts of a string. For example say I save all my my skills from my.skill1 to my.skill5 into a string like this "45,356.34,673,56.475,101,". Now lets say I decided I want to turn around and restore the skills, one of the biggest problems is that the string will be read as a whole. file_str_read uses a delimiter (delimit_str), maybe str_read could do the same. So i decided to work around this, I thought i could maybe read the string 1 character at a time. I was right, however I can only do that with str_to_asc. Then I need to convert the ascii back into a character by converting the ascii number first into a string with str_for_asc, and finally into a variable. After that I would store that variable into a string with str_cat, then str_clip the original string and continue on..

If your confused by now (believe me i was also) you'll see that besides saving a lot of lines of code we could speed things up a bit for people writing custom load and save scripts (which for multip-layer games is important).

If you'd like I can post the code of what I described above.

Agreed. I believe that regular expressions are the resolution for each and every problem with strings, though - can we have some, please?

I dunnow what you mean by "str_read". However, you shouldn't use string functions when saving variables.

Use file_var_read and file_var_write and you're done.

As far as I understood the request, PrenceOfDarkness wanted to have a new function str_read which reads a string "step by step" by using a delimiter. Just as file_str_read, only the string is not read from a file but rather from another string.
I second this, but I think it would be better to simply have some regex operations available, such as
Code:

---

string some_string = "This is a test";
some_text_object.string = split_str( "/\s+/",some_string );

---

...and so on.
In the example, the function split_str would use the regular expression provided (this one looks for Spaces in an unlimited number) to cut the string into several pieces and return the pieces as an array.
Such functions would make working with strings a pleasure, I think.

that could work also, but my way is good because it would work just like file_str_read, what ever is read could simply be stored.