Check if first letter of word is a capital letter

Question

Is it possible in Javascript to find out if the first letter of a word is a capital letter?

Answer 1

The other answers on this page are fine for strings that are known to only contain non-accented A-Z letters. If you can't guarantee this (e.g. user input), they may give unexpected results: false positives for uncapitalisable initials like "1940s" or "中文", or false negatives for accented or non-Roman capital initials like "Łukasz" or "Александра".

This variant returns true if the initial is any capital letter, and only if it's a capital letter:

function initialIsCapital( word ){
  return word[0] !== word[0].toLowerCase();
}

Use .charAt(0) instead of [0] if you need IE8 support. Which is faster varies between browsers.

This avoids two potential pitfalls with the other answers:

• Regexes using [A-Z] will fail to match accented and other similar non-A-Z capitalised letters such as in Åland (Scandinavian islands) and Łukasz (common Polish name), including capital letters in non-latin scripts such as Cyrillic or Greek (e.g. Александра).

• The approach using word[0] === word[0].toUpperCase(), will return true on words that start with non-letters, such as 1940s, 17th, 123reg (company name), abbreviations like 2mrw, or some words in some African languages, such as !xūún or ǂǐ-sì. It'll also treat any input from an alphabet that doesn't have capital letters as being capital letters (e.g. 中文).

Since this arbitrary-input-safe approach is just as simple and no less readable than the alternatives, it's probably better to use this even if you don't anticipate such exceptions.

Here's a quick test:

function a(word){
  return word[0] !== word[0].toLowerCase();
}
function b(word){
  return word[0] === word[0].toUpperCase();
}
function c(word){
  return /^[A-Z]/.test( word );
}
function test(word, answer){
  console.log( 'Should be '+answer+':',  a(word), b(word), c(word), '-------', word );
}

test( 'Łukasz', true ); // regex test fails, returns false
test( 'Александра', true ); // regex test fails, returns false
test( '1940s', false ); // .toUpperCase() test fails, returns true
test( '中文', false ); // .toUpperCase() test fails, returns true

test( 'ß', false ); // All pass on German "sharp S" that has no uppercase
test( 'Z̢̜̘͇̹̭a͎͚͔͕̩̬̭͈͞l̩̱̼̤̣g̲̪̱̼̘̜͟ợ̮̱͎̗̕ͅͅ', true ); // All pass. Phew, Zalgo not awakened 

Answer 2

Typescript

//userEntry input as string
//return boolean
oneUppercaseRequired(userEntry: string): boolean {
   const letters = /[A-Z]/;

   if (letters.test(userEntry[0]))
     return true;

   return false;
}

for-loop for other languages Change the syntax to your language!

//userEntry param as string
//return boolean
oneUppercaseRequired(userEntry: string): boolean {
   const letters = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";

   for (let i = 0; i < letters.length; i++) {
     if (userEntry[0] == letters[i])
       return true;
   }

   return false;
}