For those that don't know, this is a repeat of substring function. See that thread for related discussion.

And I think my last comment there, RE: RE: Re: substring function, answered it (as far as his need to use substr goes). If that did not help you, please respond and explain why and perhaps we can come up with a slightly different approach. I never saw a reply to my post so I assumed you had gotten it working.

I still think you're doing something weird here. It's not natural to have binary ^M's in ASCII data like that unless you goofed up the ASCII transfer and/or don't understand how newlines work or how to work with ASCII data on multiple platforms. This is very fishy, but if you want to insist on keeping us in the dark, I hope this solution helps you. I don't think this is the root of your problem, though. That's why I don't like solving it under these constraints.