If you are trying to detect the nick portion of someone else's text, you can't be sure of what format their nicknames will be. mIRC uses <nick>, which can't be changed with a mIRC setting, however, the default display can be halted and replaced with a custom one. Different people may have different scripts, and will, therefore, have different formats. Also, other IRC clients (XChat, Chatzilla, etc) may have different formats.

-genius_at_work