How to remove everything behind the empty space?

how can I delete everything that is b开发者_开发百科ehind an empty space. I have a date like: 10.10.2010 18:34 with an empty space between the year and the 18. I only need the first part of the string (only 10.10.2010). So I tried to use preg_replace to remove everything behind the empty space, but it doesnt work. How would my expression have to be?

Thank you for your help! phpheini

Based on your simple requirements, rather than going with a full regex solution, you can simply tokenize the string using strtok()

$datePart = strtok($dateString, ' ');

Edit: The only reason I could see to involve regular expressions would be to validate the date-time string at the same time as extracting parts. For example

if (preg_match('/(\d{1,2}\.\d{1,2}\.\d{4}) (\d{1,2}:\d{2})/', $dateTimeString, $parts)) {
    $date = $parts[1];
    $time = $parts[2];
} else {
    throw new Exception('Invalid date-time string format');
}

If you're confident of the formatting:

$date = strstr('10.10.2010 18:34', ' ', true); // requires PHP 5.3.0 or greater

$str = '10.10.2010 18:34';

$str = preg_replace('/\s.*?$/', '', $str);

var_dump($str); // string(10) "10.10.2010"

CodePad.

As Phil Brown states, however, using something like strtok() is much better for a simple task like this (compare the answers and it is obvious).