Smarty: extract first word of variable-Collection of common programming errors

I’m using smarty template engine to implement my templates for a website.

I have to extract the first word of a varible, e.g. the variable “$a” with the content “hello world foo …” must be seperated into two variables: “$b” = “hello” and “$c” with the rest (which can be of different size) of “$a”, so “world foo …”.