I am processing strings with a date somewhere in it. There are different ways the date can appear in this string: 

"… 01.11.2009 18:00-21:00 …" or 
"… 01.11.2009 18:00-02.11.2009 15:00 …" or 
"… 01.11.2009 18:00 …" 

Regardless how the date appears I only need the beginning date "01.11.2009 18:00". So if there are two matches it's just the first one. How can I isolate/explode this from the full string in php. any idea?

I guess I need to create a pattern with regex and then matching it with preg\_match. Is this the way? Unfortunately I am not into regex very much. Could anyone help with getting my single date block from a random string?