title: Where do these extra characters come from from a user's profile name?
body: <p>When I'm evaluating a SharePoint list's custom field of type 'User' I'd expect to only get the username but instead I'm seeing additional characters at the start that I need to trim out.</p>
  
  <p><code>SPContext.Current.ListItem[NameOfUserField]</code> has the value of</p>
  
  <p>"14;#DeeMac"</p>
  
  <p>And as a side note - this field is being treated as a string - but in my xml files I've defined it as a 'User' field type - where and why has this conversion been made? I did originally try to cast it as <code>SPFieldUser</code> which failed.</p>