title: how to retrieve part of a string in java?
body: <p>I am designing a chat applet. In this, a user will append his name to the beginning of the message that he sends to the other user. In the window of other user, I want to retrieve the appended user name from that string. How do I do that? The message sent by the user is as follows :</p>
  
  <pre><code>final_msg = user_name + ": " + user_message
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Hence I want to know how to retrieve the user_name string only. Is there a function that can retrieve a substring upto the first ":"? I dont want to use final_msg.split(":"), because there is a possiblity that the user_message contains ":", which will then give me an array of strings.</p>