Question

I have a line that typically starts with a few spaces as the lines are in columns and use a monospace font to make things line up. I want to check if the first non-white space character (or even just the first thing that isn’t a space) and see if that is a number. What is the least server intensive way of doing this?

Answer 1

You can use trim() (or ltrim() in this case) to delete the whitespace, and make use of the array access of strings:

$line = ltrim($line);
is_numeric($line[0]);