PHP : Extract part of a string starting from the middle

Extracting part of the string is a fairly common task in programming and sometimes it can be a bit challenging to extract string starting from a middle of a larger string.

To illustrate the problem here. Let say your :

Problem :

You have a string that looks like this :

 expires  Friday, December 23, 2014 @ 11:59pm 

and you want to final string result to be like :

 Friday, December 23, 2014

Solutions :

First solution :

Use substr(), strlen() and strpos() functions

 $string = "expires  Friday, December 23, 2014 @ 11:59pm";
 $final = substr($string, 14, strpos($string, '@') - strlen($string));

Second solution :

Which is more efficient, but less simpler to grasp for those not familiar with regular expression

 $string = "expires  Friday, December 23, 2014 @ 11:59pm";
 $final = preg_replace('/expires\s*(.*?)@/', '\1', $string);