Extracting Values between Characters

I have a str say

$str = "My name is %john% and I live in a house. My freind is called %sarah" and she lives in another house";

I need search the string to find all words which are surrounded by the % and stick them in an array if possible.

Does anyone know how to do this?

Thanks in advance

try:

$str = "My name is %john% and I live in a house. My freind is called %sarah% and she lives in another house";

preg_match_all( "/%(\w+)%/", $str, $m );

while( list( $key, $val ) = each( $m[1] )) {
print "$key => $val<br>\n";
}

hth
stew