Regular Expressions are your friends.

Two and a half years ago, when I first dove into web development, I wasn’t very familiar with regular expressions. They certainly didn’t look regular to me, looked more like someone’s keyboard exploded. Now, having figured out a thing or two about them, I came across the following lines:

		$pos = strpos ( $this->user->privs, 'del');
		if ($pos===FALSE)
		{ // edit not found in string privs
			return FALSE;
		} else {
		// figure out where the string ends by looking for a comma, return that substring
			$next_comma = strpos( $this->user->privs, "," , $pos);
			if ($next_comma===FALSE) $next_comma=strlen($this->user->privs);
			$len = $next_comma-$pos;
			$epriv = substr ($this->user->privs, $pos, $len);
			return $epriv;

Which I was able to boil down into the following:

    if ( preg_match("/del_[a-z]+/", $privString, $match) )
    {
        return $match[0];
    } else {
        return false;
    }