return first token/word from string?

I'm on Oracle 9i. Is there any built in function that would return the first token or string from a string?

For example, given string = " bob lfcr bill"

I want to return "bob"

imediately following bob there might be cases where we have a linefeed/ cr.

Thanks for any help or information. Received on Wed Aug 22 2007 - 14:21:25 CDT