SPList query result different from SPList column display

Question

I'm doing an SPQuery on the 'Modified By' (Editor) column of a SPList.

While my SharePoint list displays names like #Doe, John, my query result for this column is 1;#Doe John. Where does the 1; come from ?

Answer 1

It is the default SharePoint behavior.

When you get any user value field from the list, it will return always in this format: 1;#Doe John

where ;# is the delimiter to separate the username which is Doe John and 1 is the ID of the username for that site.

Look at the below code for example:

SPFieldUserValue userValue = new SPFieldUserValue(web, item["Editor"].ToString());
SPUser author = userValue.User;

Above code gets the whole value (1:#Doe John) in SPFieldUserValue object and parse the value to get other details of the user like login name, email etc..

Hope this helps!