How would I get everything before a : in a string Python

You don’t need regex for this

>>> s = "Username: How are you today?"

You can use the split method to split the string on the ':' character

>>> s.split(':')
['Username', ' How are you today?']

And slice out element [0] to get the first part of the string

>>> s.split(':')[0]
'Username'

Using index:

>>> string = "Username: How are you today?"
>>> string[:string.index(":")]
'Username'

The index will give you the position of : in string, then you can slice it.

If you want to use regex:

>>> import re
>>> re.match("(.*?):",string).group()
'Username'                       

match matches from the start of the string.

you can also use itertools.takewhile

>>> import itertools
>>> "".join(itertools.takewhile(lambda x: x!=":", string))
'Username'

I have benchmarked these various technics under Python 3.7.0 (IPython).

TLDR

• fastest (when the split symbol c is known): pre-compiled regex.
• fastest (otherwise): s.partition(c)[0].
• safe (i.e., when c may not be in s): partition, split.
• unsafe: index, regex.

Code

import string, random, re

SYMBOLS = string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits
SIZE = 100

def create_test_set(string_length):
    for _ in range(SIZE):
        random_string = ''.join(random.choices(SYMBOLS, k=string_length))
        yield (random.choice(random_string), random_string)

for string_length in (2**4, 2**8, 2**16, 2**32):
    print("nString length:", string_length)
    print("  regex (compiled):", end=" ")
    test_set_for_regex = ((re.compile("(.*?)" + c).match, s) for (c, s) in test_set)
    %timeit [re_match(s).group() for (re_match, s) in test_set_for_regex]
    test_set = list(create_test_set(16))
    print("  partition:       ", end=" ")
    %timeit [s.partition(c)[0] for (c, s) in test_set]
    print("  index:           ", end=" ")
    %timeit [s[:s.index(c)] for (c, s) in test_set]
    print("  split (limited): ", end=" ")
    %timeit [s.split(c, 1)[0] for (c, s) in test_set]
    print("  split:           ", end=" ")
    %timeit [s.split(c)[0] for (c, s) in test_set]
    print("  regex:           ", end=" ")
    %timeit [re.match("(.*?)" + c, s).group() for (c, s) in test_set]

Results

String length: 16
  regex (compiled): 156 ns ± 4.41 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)
  partition:        19.3 µs ± 430 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)
  index:            26.1 µs ± 341 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  split (limited):  26.8 µs ± 1.26 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  split:            26.3 µs ± 835 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  regex:            128 µs ± 4.02 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)

String length: 256
  regex (compiled): 167 ns ± 2.7 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)
  partition:        20.9 µs ± 694 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  index:            28.6 µs ± 2.73 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  split (limited):  27.4 µs ± 979 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  split:            31.5 µs ± 4.86 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  regex:            148 µs ± 7.05 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)

String length: 65536
  regex (compiled): 173 ns ± 3.95 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)
  partition:        20.9 µs ± 613 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)
  index:            27.7 µs ± 515 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  split (limited):  27.2 µs ± 796 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  split:            26.5 µs ± 377 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  regex:            128 µs ± 1.5 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)

String length: 4294967296
  regex (compiled): 165 ns ± 1.2 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)
  partition:        19.9 µs ± 144 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100000 loops each)
  index:            27.7 µs ± 571 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  split (limited):  26.1 µs ± 472 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  split:            28.1 µs ± 1.69 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)
  regex:            137 µs ± 6.53 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000 loops each)

partition() may be better then split() for this purpose as it has the better predicable results for situations you have no delimiter or more delimiters.

To solve this using RegEx, you can use the Negative Lookahead/Negative Lookbehind approach.

For example, the code below for Python:

import re
string = "Username: How are you today?"
regex='(S*)[:]'

data=re.findall(regex, string)
print(data)