how to retrieve part of a string in java?
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 :

**final_msg = user_name + ": " + user_message**

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.
how to retrieve part of a string in java?
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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 :

**final_msg = user_name + ": " + user_message**

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.