I would like to check if the first character of a string is a letter or not. My regular expression is:

 '/^([a-zA-Z.*])$/'

This is not working. What's wrong with it?

I would like to check if the first character of a string is a letter or not. My regular expression is:

 '/^([a-zA-Z.*])$/'

This is not working. What's wrong with it?

• javascript
• regex

3 Answers 3

Your expression does not need .* nor should it have the $

'/^([a-zA-Z])/'

In fact, if you don't need to know what this letter is, you could go even simpler:

'/^[a-zA-Z]/'

// These expressions are true
/^[a-zA-Z]/.test("Sample text")

var re = new RegExp('^[a-zA-Z]');
re.test('Sample text');

Try the following:

'/^[a-zA-Z].*$/'

which checks if the first letter is in the alphabet and allows any character after that.

I was able to single out the first letter with this /^[a-zA-Z].*$/ from one of the above answers, but I didn't need the .\*$ so I had /^[A-J]/g (working on my own assignment hence a-j).