[Resolved] Pattern Matching

[bike5]

I am pulling a selection from a database that is a text type so it can be very long of an text entry. I need to pull out a name after a qualifier "From:" in the beggining, the first time it encounters it.

$row = "[12/09/04][09:36PM][From:TheName] - This could be a long text message blabla bla.";

I need to pull out TheName from that, and stop after that. I don't want anyone to be able to type in the message body [From:AName] and have my code pull that name too.

How could I go about doing this? Thank you in advance for any help.

Edit: I could cut the first part of the string (all being same in lenght) then pull up to the "]" to get the name but some messages don't include the first part (these messages I don't need to extract a name from) so I think a pattern match would be better because I could check to see if it matches the pattern before even running any other operations to extract the name?

[Weedpacket]

You can find the xxxx in the [From:xxxx] with the preg_match pattern

/\[From:(.*?)\]/

.

Stopping posters from using [From:xxx] themselves would probably involve examining the posts as they are made with the same pattern and remove or corrupt it in some way (replace the [ with [, say) - before they go in the database. Unless you've got a consistent format, in which case you can match the pieces that comply with that format, and then all the rest would be "content", whatever it is. This is how protocols like http and smtp work.