Unable to get strpos() to work correctly in class method - more....

I just noticed something weird in the debug information that I am getting from this program that probably has something to do with my problem, but I don't quite know what to make if it. Perhaps someone can clue me into what is going on. When the 'extract_quotes($string)' method is called the $string it is passed comes from another variable that holds the cleaned contents of a text input. I didn't notice before but as I looked at the string using var_dump(), immediately after it has gotten passed into the method, I get an anomalous report. Below is what I get: string(57) ""some phrase" single "another phrase"" The outermost quotes excluded, I count 37 characters in the string. Why are 57 being reported? Could the miscount be an indicator of why the method doesn't recognize any of the quotes? Jonathan