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
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