Capturing part of regex search

I've been looking at the regex functions. Either it's a lack of caffeine or it's right in front of my nose, but how do I put part of a regex find into a variable? Plus I suck at regex. e.g. I'm interested in capturing the names of people who are found in text surrounded by the following format: "John Doe":/cr/johndoe/ or "Jane Smith":/cr/janesmith/ I'd want to place John Doe or Jane Smith into the variable. The search will always be for "name":/cr/nameurl/ What regex and php function would I use? Thanks for any pointers. One of these days I'll master regex.