Mel: Query part of a string, given its index and separator

UPDATE: Updated version with better functioning here.
I realised how often I was using a mix of the tokenize, startString and endString to get sections of a string, whether the start or end (various ways) or the middle (ie getting the side "L_*" or "R_*" or type of object "*_ctrl" "*_bind_jnt") etc, and I loved the way python handles this instead (especially the reverse indexing) so I come up with this.
global proc string ld_getName(string $obj,string $separator,int $index) { string $buffer[],$name ; tokenize $obj $separator $buffer ; if($index<0) $name=$buffer[size($buffer)-int(abs($index))] ; else $name=$buffer[$index] ; return $name ; } //ld_getName "L_test_me_out_ctrl" "_" -1 ;
EDIT: Changed positive indexing to match 0 = start, -1 = end