Check if String Starts with a Letter in PHP

This tutorial will discuss about unique ways to check if string starts with a letter in php.

Table Of Contents

Method 1: Using Regex

PHP provides a function preg_match(), it accepts a regex pattern as first parameter and a string as the second parameter. If the string matches the given regex pattern, then it returns 1 otherwise it returns 0.

So to check if a string starts with the letter or not we will use this regex pattern i.e. “/^[a-zA-Z]/”.

We have created a separate function to check if string starts with a letter,

function startsWithLetter($str)
{
    return preg_match('/^[a-zA-Z]/', $str) === 1;
}

This function returns true if This string starts with any letter.

Let’s see the complete example,

<?php
/**
 * Checks if a string starts with a letter using
 * regular expressions (preg_match()).
 *
 * @param string $str The string to check.
 * @return bool True if the string starts with a letter, false otherwise.
 */
function startsWithLetter($str)
{
    return preg_match('/^[a-zA-Z]/', $str) === 1;
}

$strValue = "Last Train";

// Check if String starts with a Alphabet or Letter
if (startsWithLetter($strValue)) {
    echo "The string starts with a letter.";
} else {
    echo "The string does not start with a letter.";
}
?>

Output

The string starts with a letter.

Method 2: Using ctype_alpha() function

PHP provides a function ctype_alpha(), which accepts a string as an argument and returns true if all the characters in the string are alphabetic only i.e. letters only.

So, to check if string starts with the a letter, we will fetch the first character from the string and we will pass into the ctype_alpha() function, if it returns true then it means that the string starts with the alphabet or a letter.

Let’s see the complete example,

<?php
/**
 * Checks if a string starts with a letter using ctype_alpha().
 *
 * @param string $str The string to check.
 * @return bool True if the string starts with a letter, false otherwise.
 */
function startsWithAlphabet($str)
{
    return ctype_alpha($str[0]);
}

$strValue = "Last Train";

// Check if String starts with a Alphabet or Letter
if (startsWithAlphabet($strValue)) {
    echo "The string starts with a letter.";
} else {
    echo "The string does not start with a letter.";
}
?>

Output

The string starts with a letter.

Summary

Today, we learned about two different ways to check if string starts with the letter in PHP.

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