regular expression

I have a string that follows:

"(4888)--helloworld"

4888: is a number of any length

I need a regular expression that takes out the number from the string. Note, the number is always between parenthesis and followed by two dashes.

Thanks so much.
-Randy

you dont exactly need a regular expression here.. i mean.. you could use one where you pass it an array

ereg("^([0-9])--", $some_str, $some_array);
$some_array[1] should contain the number.

otherwise, i would look into using strpos, strstr, and substr functions to just do manipulation on the string

below is a small corectio to miasma's solution. the {1,} was omitted. without that only 1 digit will be captured.

ereg("^{([0-9]{1,})--",} $some_str, $some_array);
$some_array[1] should contain the number.

Those 2 examples produce nothing

try
$some_str = "(4888)--helloworld" ;
ereg("^(([0-9]+))", $some_str, $some_array);
print $some_array[1];

or the PCRE route

$some_str = "(4888)--helloworld" ;
preg_match("/^((\d+))/", $some_str, $some_array);
print $some_array[1];