jaytea, to level with you, I haven't had the pleasure in using the $usermode. I presumed that it could well be triggered if you had any of those modes set at the same time...or one single mode at a time. I'm uncertain.

In regex, as I've learned that, with square brackets, the regex will search for exactly one character, no matter how many characters are in between these brackets. That, I believe, will make the regex example I show above the same as the $istokcs() version.