Find first instance of character, then stop at space?

I think I need to use some kind of regex but struggling...

I have a string e.g.

the cat sat of the mate and $10 was all it cost

I want to return

$10

And is there a universal name for currency codes so I could return £10 if it was

the cat sat of the mate and £10 was all it cost

Or a way to add more characters to the expression

explode() is probably the function you are looking for. It will break up the sentence by the desired character (in your case the space) and return everything as an array.

Untested, but should work:

$sentence = 'the cat sat of the mate and $10 was all it cost';

// Split $sentence into $words on one-or-more spaces
$words = preg_split( '/\s+/s', $sentence, NULL, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY );

// Grab all $words starting with `$` or `£`
$matches = preg_grep( '/^[\$£]./', $words );

// What do we have?
print_r( $matches );

// First match
$first = reset( $matches );