Now...another problem.
let say I have:

PHP Code:

$named="johnny/john Lee Doe"; 


i want the output to be only "john".
Yes.....I want to strip the rest (johnny/ Lee Doe).
Help me please.

check this page out they have every thing you need to know basically you are going to string part of the text http://us4.php.net/manual/en/function.substr.php

Or use regular expressions

Exactly in this case it would be

PHP Code:

$named="johnny/john Lee Doe";
$re = "!^([^\/]+)\/([^ ]+) (.*)$!";
preg_match($re, $named, $match);
print_r($match);
// john will be stored in $match[2];
// or just replace the string with name
$part = preg_replace($re, "\\2", $named); 


yea that works too