strcspn() can also be thought of as analogous to the following regular expression:
<?php
// where ... represents the mask of characters
preg_match('/[^ ...]/', substr($subject, $start, $length) );
?>
By this analogy, strcspn() can be used in place of some regular expressions to match a pattern without the overhead of a regex engine -- for example, ways to verify if an input string represents a binary value:
<?php
preg_match('/^[01]+$/i', $subject);
// or...
!preg_match('/[^01]/i', $subject);
// ...or using strcspn()
!strcspn($subject, '01');
?>