Use substring from paragraph in ?

Hello all,

Does FM (we're using version 11) allow any type of expressions within  variables in order to pull a substring out of a paragraph for use in a Running H/F? I've researched this as much as possible and I've done a search on the forum and the initial responses don't look promising, although those responses seem to be for prior versions...

An example would be a  paragraph that looks like this:

Tropical Island - A wonderful place to be

and we want to pull out only

Tropical Island

for the Running H/F so that we can take advantage of FM's automatic population of the header on left/right pages similar to a dictionary  using <$paratext[MyTag]> and <$paratext[+,MyTag]>, only that MyTag is  the substring from the paragraph, not the entire paragraph.

I greatly appreciate any help or suggestions.

Thank you!