escaping a colon in a function

[kutek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

hello,

i have read the docs and i have not found therein a way to escape a 
colon within a function.

what i am doing is parsing the output of ifconfig to get my currently 
active ip address.the ouput of that function is in the form 

     addr:0.0.0.0

and i am attempting to use the ${name##pattern} construct to remove the
"addr:" from the ultimate output. unfortunately,zsh seems to be interpreting 
the colon in the pattern as a delimiter and complains that there is no 
closing brace in the function. i have tried both single and double quotes 
as well as the backslash to escape the colon's special meaning..to no avail.

Any suggestions? TIA.