Regex

[freerobots]

I'm fairly new to working with regular expressions. I have tried to create one that will capture everything from the begining of a string to the end. What i'm actually trying to capture are big5 encoded characters in the string, they just happened to be placed first. The expression i'm using is:

$chinese = preg_match("/^{.*\s/",$string);}

That did not return anything, so I to capture only unicode characters using this expression with no success:
$chinese = preg_match("/[\w\pL]/u",$string);

That did not work either. So I guess my question is:

How do I capture everything from the beginning of a string to the space, and will preg_match read foreign characters?

Thanks

[dream_scape]

Do I understand this correctly: There is a string and you want to pull out everything up to the first whitespace character?

Here are a couple ways without using regex:

$chinese = substr($string, 0, strpos($string, ' '));

$chinese = array_shift(explode(' ', $string));