Extracting a number

[Crump]

Lets say I have some lines of text that looks like this:

DAVID 6.45  JOHN 5.32  MICHAEL 49.24 
GREG 3.93  LUKE 2.24  GEORGE 20.42 

They are columns, but they are not aligned perfectly. Say I wanted to write a piece of code that went in, and got the number next to Luke.

Can't use substr because the columns get distored. However, there will always be a bit of whitespace in between each column (a variable amount).

What is the best way to do it?

[dreamcatcher]

Maybe explode() [uk.php.net]?

dc

[henry0]

"variable space"?

Are we speaking about getting this from an existing text or from a DB

[hakre]

Maybe preg_match_all() [php.net]?