How to get position of the first letter in a string [closed]

Answer 1

If you don't need regex you can do it just by looping through (My reccomendation)

public int findFirstLetterPosition(String input) {
    char c;
    for (int i = 0; i < input.length(); i++) {
        c = input.charAt(i);
        if ( (c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') || (c >= 'A' || c <= 'Z') ) {
            return i;
        }
    }
    return -1; // not found
}

EDIT

In response to some comments, you could also do this less explicitly using a built in static method, and add some handling for non-ASCII characters using isLetter:

public int findFirstLetterPosition(String input) {
    for (int i = 0; i < input.length(); i++) {
        if (Character.isLetter(input.charAt(i))) {
            return i;
        }
    }
    return -1; // not found
}

You can also use isAlphabetic:

public int findFirstLetterPosition(String input) {
    for (int i = 0; i < input.length(); i++) {
        if (Character.isAlphabetic(input.charAt(i))) {
            return i;
        }
    }
    return -1; // not found
}

The latter includes some alphabetic characters from other languages which are iffy on whether to box them as characters or phrases

ref: Character.isLetter, Character.isAlphabetic