PCRE regular expression match the first letter of a string

Question

Could you point me out a PCRE RegEx that would match only the first letter of a string. I need to pass to Mongo DB, I'm concerning about performances at the moment I'm using ^a.

Examples:

MATCH

apple

alligator

NO MATCH

thanks

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 30 '12 at 13:59

5

there are special tokens in PCRE to represent beginning and end of a string

/^a/ => will match all strings that start with "a"

answered Nov 30 '12 at 13:59

keymone

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This solved the problem, I was not aware about the special token. Thanks – GibboK Nov 30 '12 at 14:01

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 30 '12 at 13:59

2

You can use a start of string anchor ^.

^a

answered Nov 30 '12 at 13:59

Mark Byers

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PCRE regular expression match the first letter of a string

2 Answers2