Question

Possible Duplicates:
PHP Regex to convert text before colon to link
Return the portion of a string before the first occurrence of a character in PHP

I need to get the username from a Twitter RSS feed.

I am returning this data from the feed as the title, and I want to extract the username.

UsernameIwanttoget:This is the Twitter message....

So basically, get all the text before :.

Answer 1

$pos = strpos($text, ':');
if ($pos !== false) {
    $username = substr($text, 0, $pos);
    $message  = substr($text, $pos + 1);
}

You don’t really need regular expressions here. Regular expressions are slow and not easily understandable if you’re not familiar with them, so you’d better go with a string function when you can.

You should use cdhowie’s answer instead.