Strings: Finding the index value of the 1st alphabet character

Question

Hi
I'm trying to find a way of finding the index position of the 1st alphabetic character i.e. letters from "a" to "z" in a string line.
I've tried looking at the java doc pages on the String Class which contains methods such "indexOf" but i'm very confused on how this all works??
Could someone please help me.
Thanks
Rahul

Answer 1

Another way is to use regular expressions:
import java.util.regex.*;
class RegExTest {   
    public int indexOfRegEx(String regex , String inString){
        Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex);
        Matcher m = p.matcher(inString);
        boolean found = m.find();
        return found ? m.start() : -1;
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        RegExTest test = new RegExTest();
        System.out.println(test.indexOfRegEx("[A-Za-z]", "a124321"));
        System.out.println(test.indexOfRegEx("[A-Za-z]", "12A4321"));
        System.out.println(test.indexOfRegEx("\\p{Alpha}", "124321"));
        System.out.println(test.indexOfRegEx("\\p{Alpha}", "124321a"));
}