How do I find out if first character of a string is a number?

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In Java is there a way to find out if first character of a string is a number?

One way is

string.startsWith("1")

and do the above all the way till 9, but that seems very inefficient.

6 Answers
Character.isDigit(string.charAt(0))

Note that this will allow any Unicode digit, not just 0-9. You might prefer:

char c = string.charAt(0);
isDigit = (c >= '0' && c <= '9');

Or the slower regex solutions:

s.substring(0, 1).matches("\\d")
// or the equivalent
s.substring(0, 1).matches("[0-9]")

However, with any of these methods, you must first be sure that the string isn't empty. If it is, charAt(0) and substring(0, 1) will throw a StringIndexOutOfBoundsException. startsWith does not have this problem.

To make the entire condition one line and avoid length checks, you can alter the regexes to the following:

s.matches("\\d.*")
// or the equivalent
s.matches("[0-9].*")

If the condition does not appear in a tight loop in your program, the small performance hit for using regular expressions is not likely to be noticeable.

IN KOTLIN :

Suppose that you have a String like this :

private val phoneNumber="9121111111"

At first you should get the first one :

val firstChar=phoneNumber.slice(0..0)

At second you can check the first char that return a Boolean :

firstChar.isInt() // or isFloat()

To verify only first letter is number or character -- For number Character.isDigit(str.charAt(0)) --return true

For character Character.isLetter(str.charAt(0)) --return true

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