Grabbing city names and numbers from a CSV file I've got information that is imported from a CSV file that my site grabs every day with PHP. I'm just learning RegEx so I'm able to do what I need to do but am looking to get more efficient with my coding.

Some of example of the kinds of strings that would come in would be:

15 SE NORFOLK
5 NNE OAKLAND
1 S LOS ANGELES
1 NW SACRAMENTO
BOSTON


It's basically numbers then directional letters then city name. Sometimes there aren't numbers and letters so I'm checking to see first and then just deleting them with preg_replace if there are (I just need the city name).

Here's the expression I have that works:

$location = preg_replace('/^[\d]+[\s]+[a-zA-z]+[\s]/', '', $string);


I know with regex there are a bunch of different ways to different things so I'm curious if there's a more efficient way to do what I'm doing.
Leave out the square brackets:

^\d+\s+[A-Z]+\s+


Square brackets are used for "character classes", like

[A-Z]


which matches exactly one letter out of the range A to Z.

\d already is a class: all the numbers.