xby-char-index

Most string utilities hand you a split and a replace then call it done, yet real-world work often demands tighter positioning. Which character is the third semicolon? How do you swap exactly the 42nd through 87th positions for something else without disturbing the rest? Regular expressions and naive slicing make these requests fragile. xby-char-index treats the string as a fully indexed sequence so every operation lands on a deterministic offset rather than a best guess.

Its capabilities span the full locate-to-edit pipeline: find the Nth occurrence of a character or substring, list every index where it appears, insert or delete at exact offsets, extract all regex matches with start-end coordinates, pull content between two markers, and get a quick character census covering letters, digits, spaces, and specials. Negative indices are supported throughout, return shapes are consistent, and downstream code can consume the results without extra parsing.

If you are building test fixtures with fixed-format text, parsing positional log lines or config fragments, or slicing fields by column offset in a data-cleaning pipeline, this plugin turns your string work from approximate to precise.