MySQL query to extract first word from a field

I would like to run a query that returns the first word only from a particular field, this field has multiple words separated by spaces, I assume I may need to carry out some regex work to accomplish this? I know how to do this using a few ways in PHP but this would best be carried out on the database side. Any ideas much appreciated. Thanks.

Answer

SUBSTRING_INDEX: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html#function_substring-index

SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(`name`, ' ', 1);