Get content before the more tag

I make heavy use of the more tag in posts and custom post types in WordPress

It is a convenient way to quickly create an intro to a piece of content but WordPress doesn’t have a handy method to access the content before the more tag.

Helpfully someone has already worked out how to do this on wordpress.stackexchange.com

// Fetch post content
$content = get_post_field( 'post_content', get_the_ID() );

// Get content parts
$content_parts = get_extended( $content );

// Output part before <!--more--> tag
echo $content_parts['main'];

If you are then going to echo out the content after the more tag, you will need to run the array through a filter to apply formatting

echo apply_filters('the_content', $content_parts['main']);