Well left gets N charactors starting from the left hand side. Ex: If you had the word "Hello" and type $left(hello, 2) it would return "He".
The gettok can be compared to a brick wall. The bricks are the things your looking for and the mortar is the token. If you had the string "a.b.c.d" and did $gettok(a.b.c.d, 2, 46) then you would get the letter b. its the second lerrer, (thus the 2) and the spacer is a period (characer 46).
If you need more help, the help index is always a great place to look. >:D
