Dimming inside string functions doesn't work

[taitox]

Steps to reproduce the problem

If using $cut(<%year%>,4), the currently highlighted track shows the 4 first characters of %year%, but any non-highlighted track returns "[001B]1;-".
If using <$cut(%year%,4)>, everything works correctly.
The same happens when using $left.

What's going on? Describe the problem in as much detail as possible.

Beforehand, I am aware that we shouldn't expect everything to work yet when using title formatting.

The extreme example cited above happens when using $cut and $len. Most other functions give me no trouble, such as $if(%isplaying%,%length%,<%length%>) which is always displayed correctly in any situation.
A similar but less annoying behavior happens when using other string functions, such as $num(<%year%>,6), which outputs text without dimming. However, <$num(%year%,6)> does give me dimming. Same when using $directory. So I presume this only applies to string functions, hence the title, but the only one that gave me a completely unusable output until now was $left/$cut..

This worked in either way in foobar2000, so I initially tried the first option by copypasting f2k's formatting until I found a solution.

Information about the software:

Deadbeef version: 1.9.6-1, installed from AUR
OS: Linux, kernel 6.8.8-arch1-1

[Oleksiy-Yakovenko]

I have made a fix, which ignores escape sequences when counting characters in the $cut function.
There are some possible side-effects from that, since the input data is ambiguous when the input string is more complex.
For example $cut(<%year%><xxyy>,4) will output <1234>< because it would continue scanning until it encounters a non-escape character.

I don't know how problematic this is, and I can't see how to resolve such cases unambiguously.
Any input is appreciated.

If this fix is well accepted / not causing much issues -- I'll add a similar fix to other substring-related functions.