mb_strpos index woes

hello world. (my first email) well, i have this problem with mb_strpos which returns a position for me. the position is an index into the string, supposedly. everything works fine excpet for when i index into the array. i wish to confirm that the position is the character count not the byte count into the string. thank you very much. if i am correct, i would request a change of the word 'character' in here to mean multi-byte character for clarity sake mb_strpos() performs multi-byte safe strpos() operation based on number of characters. needle position is counted from the beginning of the haystack. First character's position is 0. Second character position is 1, and so on. code is this: $french2=<<<SXR <BR>Il m'arrive d'être égoiste. Je sais.<BR><BR><IMG height=446 src="http://www.u-blog.net/bezabel/img/bdFM-oueb2.jpg" width=400 border=0><BR>(<A href="http://blogdamned.free.fr/?2005/05">Blog DAmned</A>&nbsp;pour en savoir plus) SXR; $match_pos = mb_strpos($target, $split_pattern, $present_offset,'UTF-8'); // check for false omitted while (($match_pos || $first) && $present_offset < $len ) { // check for 0 omitted $diff = $match_pos-$present_offset; $word = mb_substr($target, $present_offset, $diff); $mb_len = mb_strlen($word); if ($mb_len != $diff) if ($debug_my_mb) echo "$mb_len and $diff are not equal<br>"; $match_pos2 = $mb_len + $present_offset; if ($match_pos2 != $match_pos) if ($debug_my_mb) echo "$match_pos and $match_pos2 are not equal<br>"; TEHY ARE EQUAL, HOWEVER if ($target[$match_pos] != $split_pattern) if ($debug_my_mb) echo "<br>mismatch of $next_word and $split_pattern<br>"; SAYS IT IS A MISMATCH therefore must return character count, not byte count.