How to check if character is a letter in Javascript?

Question

I am extracting a character in a Javascript string with:

var first = str.charAt(0);

and I would like to check whether it is a letter. Stran

Answer 1

ES6 supports unicode-aware regular expressions.

RegExp(/^\p{L}/,'u').test(str)

This works for all alphabets.

Unfortunately, there is a bug in Firefox (will be fixed in version 78) that prevents this from being used universally. But if you can control your runtime environment and it supports it (e.g. Node.js), this is a straightforward, comprehensive solution.

Atlernatively, XRegExp provides a polyfill of modern regular expression to all browsers.