Well... yes, I know what s does. People *do* use it when they know the line will start with the word/phrase. You can change that to w and use wildcards for those and it doesn't change the fact that the $readn one is still shorter in that particular example. Obviously, if they use s, they expect it to return $null if the word isn't found at the start of a line.
Btw, that $str example you gave doesn't really make much sense... $iif is a nicer (imo) way of handling it.
