Re: Regular expression to find from start of string to first space [SOLVED]

Richard, Adam, Barry, Dave, David, Thank you all for your helpful advice regarding expressions. I was able to combine all your advice, and made some additional discoveries along the way. The winning expression is: "#^(.*)\s#iU" First, I discovered that sometimes the source text had an unexpected space character at the very beginning. So I realized that I needed to do trim() to ensure proper functionality of the expression. Next, it seems it's better to use \s than an actual space, " ". It might be the case that both are okay, but I've had success with \s, so I decided to stop experimenting. I tried, as Adam suggested, to use substr() instead of a regular expression. The syntax he provided may work as far as finding the right text to extract. But I can't be sure because it seems to have problems with the character encoding. The word being extracted is in UTF-8 encoded Japanese. The regular expression seems to input and output it fine. But I couldn't find a way of using the substr() function without the text coming out as ASCII gibberish. So I'm calling this one solved for me, as I have working code. Although if anyone believes that it could be more efficient or something, of course I'm all ears. Thank you for all your time and advice. -- Dave M G