this function can be used like strspn(), except while that can be used to compare a string with an allowed pattern, this one can be use to compare a string with a FORBIDDEN pattern

so, to know if any forbidden character has a position inside our string, we can use (not tested with backslashes)...

<?php
// LARGE VERSION
$forbidden="\"\\?*:/@|<>";
if (strlen($filename) != strcspn($filename,$forbidden)) {
    echo "you cant create a file with that name!";
}

// SHORT VERSION
if (strlen($filename) - strcspn($filename,"\"\\?*:/@|<>")) {
    echo "i told you, you cant create that file";
}
?>

useful for finding beginning of quotes and/or tags in a variable containing html.  
    $pos = strcspn($data, '<"\''); 
will find the first occurance of either the beginning of a tag, or a double- or single-quoted string.

When you use the third parameter remember that the function will return the number of characters it bypassed, which will *not* be the position in your source string.  It's a simple fix to just add your third parameter value to the function result to get the position in the first string where the scan stopped, but I didn't think of it at first.

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');
?>

It might not be clear from the example, that

strcspn('abcdhelloabcd', 'abcd', -9, -5) == 4

because it's only evaluating 'hell' which doesn't contain any mask, so returns strlen('hell').