extracting part of a string

Hi

Each month I receive a travel related product feed in XML that I need to access and manipulate using PHP.

Each record in this particular XML file contains an entry like:
<name>[place] holiday reference 12345</name>

at the moment I manually add a new field for every record in the XML file for the destination, like
<destination>place</destination>
which is just an extract of the existing field
and then use...
if($this-place==$destination) {...}
where $this-place comes from somewhere else in the file
so if for example $this-place is New York, and $destination is also new York, the record prints out

Is there a way to directly access the 'place' name (New York etc) in the <name> field without having to manually add places for every record ie chop off the '[' and ']holiday reference 12345'? and just use the <name> field directly without manually adding hundreds of items?

Cheers

 

Sarah

I rephrased this question at
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=897080
because I thought I'd made it sound more complicated than it is

I haven't tested it yet but it looks like 'explode' was the function I needed

(PHP5 and simplexml by the way)

Cheers