php - First letter is number in string

Question

I was trying to find a quick and easy method to check if the first letter in a string is a number. A lot of the functions and methods I've seen on S.O seem over complicated. I'm wondering, would something like this work:

is_numeric($string[0]);

Answer 1

An easier way might be:

is_numeric(substr($string, 0, 1))

It tackles the problem of a possible empty string (that has no first character) by using substr(). substr() returns false in the case of an empty string, and false is not recognized as a number by is_numeric().