Q:

Comparing substrings in two coll objects / MAX/MSP

It seems to be difficult to process Max/MSP strings character-by-character. I have been working on using two coll objects, one with input text as one word per line:
1, phone;

and the second with the substrings that I want to isolate from the input text:
ph, {other data}
o, {other data}
a, {other data}
ch, {other data}
ne, {other data}

What I need out of this comparison is a list of every possible substring for each input word, something like:
1, p,ph,h,o,n,ne,e; 

I want to say regexp will help here, but I can't have two inputs to dictate what to isolate. Further than that, any zl object seems to only allow for processing entire words. My source text is large, so efficiency matters.
Does anyone have advice for dealing with strings character-by-character in Max? Is there anything that sounds like it could accomplish this task?

A:

atoi and itoa are the objects I typically use for tasks like this when doing it in Max. 
A simple javascript object is probably more straight-forward though.

