Read one word in file

I have a php script that reads a file that looks something like this: 1. Question One goes here: 2. Question two goes here: I need someway to have the script just read either the 1. or just the 1 When I first made the script I just had the program read the line using $questionBuffer = fgets($wq, 4096); and then I got the number by using a substring message: $currentQuestion = substr("$questionBuffer",0,1); and this works fine until I hit questions like 10 11... So how should I go about just getting the question number, ideally I would like to just read up until the first space is encountered. Is there a function to do that or will I need to create a for loop that goes through and compares each substring of 1 character to " ", and then once that " " is found, create a substring up until that " " character was found? Any ideas? --Andrew V. Romero To reply personally, remove all numbers from my address.