Filtering post title using regex

Hi all,

I am trying to grab text between some quotes in a title tag and I’m using regex to do this. I have the following code to do this.

$subject = ‘Hello – “My Name Is Eric”‘ //post title
$pattern =’/”((?:[^\\”]|\\”)*)”/’;

preg_match($pattern, $subject, $matches );
echo “the match is $matches[0]”;

it works perfect. It returns “My Name Is Eric”

However if I replace $subject variable with the following:

$subject = the_title(“”,””,FALSE); //post title

there is no match.

I just can’t figure out why the_title() which returns the exact same text, Hello – “My Name Is Eric” doesn’t work. Can anyone help?