Is there no way to get a substring with pico? x:sub, which is standard in 5.1, results in an error. So does string.sub, and so does x:gsub.

Relevant: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/829063/how-to-iterate-individual-characters-in-lua-string

You can grab substrings with sub(str, start, end)

Note that pico-8 doesn't actually include the standard library, except for pairs()

Oh - that explains it. Thanks!