Emulating PHP’s substr() with Smarty [sort of]

Today I had a requirement to strip off the first 9 digits from a string from within a Smarty template. The system using Smarty is *totally* locked down so no access to plugins or using php functions as modifiers so I could not simply do $string=substr($string,9); or even {assign var=”shorterThing” value=$thing|substr:9}

In the end I used a regexp:
/^[0-9 ]{9}/
Which reads “Match from the beginning of the string digits or a space exactly 9 characters long”.

Unfortunately, Smarty uses {} as special characters so I had to further jump though hoops to get it to work by using the {capture} command.

Anyway, here’s the final code:
[php]{capture assign=foo}/^[0-9 ]{ldelim}9{rdelim}/{/capture}
{assign var=”shorterThing” value=$thing|regex_replace:$foo:””}[/php]

Of course my match is quite specific, but it worked for what I needed.