help with parseing?

[MrGannondorf]

I'm working on a script that involves checking the current weapon of the player, and some other weapons based on the index of the current weapon. The only problem is, weaponscount apears to include the -"hidden" weapons in its count, as do they have thier own weapons index. My script doesn't like hidden weapons.
To what I know there isn't any equivalent of visibleweaponscount or such, so my solution involves checking the first character of the weapon name to figure out if its hidden or not, wich leads me to my scripting problem:

I can't get the engine to parse/check the first character
I've tried the statswith flag, tokenize2, etc, but all to no avail. (and I'm not gonna rename every weapon for the sake of compatibility, thank you very much).

any helpfull ideas? (a minor emphisis on 'helpfull' and 'ideas', btw)