Grab Text from String

This should be fairly straight forward and not too difficult but im having a bit of trouble.

I have a string of text that is something like this:

Now what i want to do is just grab "Derek C"
WITHOUT the quotes, so ill have:

Derek C

I have figured out how to just grab:

but i cant seem to get it to work for the other way. Code i have looks like this:

$buffer = "\"Derek C\" <derekc@host.com>";

$fromperson = substr($buffer, (strrpos($buffer, "<")+1), -3); }

Now this works perfetc to grab the email, but how am i going to do this to grab the name?

Here is a handle little piece of code you might find useful:

$text = "\"Derek C\" <derekc@blahblah.com>";
ereg("\\"([^{\\"])\\"[[:space:]]<([^>])>",} $email, $regs);

$name = $regs[1];
$email = $regs[2];

and you are done!

$name will now contain 'Derek C' and $email will contain 'derekc@blahblah.com'

Hope that helps!

Chris King

Well that works great, but now ive run into a bit of another problem here.

The reason i needed this was because im creating a type of web based email (if you didnt guess)

Now that the problem is now is this:

if the string that im trying to extract doesnt have <your@email.com>
then $name and $email are empty.

From what ive noticed there are 3 different types of From: Lines..

Now basically i need something that will get $name and $email out of both of these..

Any ideas?