strings - get characters before a digit - go

Question

I have some strings such E2 9NZ, N29DZ, EW29DZ . I need to extract the chars before the first digit, given the above example : E, N, EW.
Am I supposed to use regex ? The strings package looks really nice but just doesn't seem to handle this case (extract everything before a specific type).
Edit:
To clarify the "question" I'm wondering what method is more idiomatic to go and perhaps likely to provide better performance.

Answer 1

For example,
package main
import (
"fmt"
"unicode"
)
func DigitPrefix(s string) string {
for i, r := range s {
if unicode.IsDigit(r) {
return s[:i]
}
}
return s
}
func main() {
fmt.Println(DigitPrefix("E2 9NZ"))
fmt.Println(DigitPrefix("N29DZ"))
fmt.Println(DigitPrefix("EW29DZ"))
fmt.Println(DigitPrefix("WXYZ"))
}
Output:
E
N
EW
WXYZ
If there is no digit, example "WXYZ", and you don't want anything returned, change return s to return "".

Answer 2

Not sure why almost everyone provided answers in everything but Go. Here is regex-based Go version:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"regexp"
)
func main() {
pattern, err := regexp.Compile("^[^\\d]*")
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
part := pattern.Find([]byte("EW29DZ"))
if part != nil {
fmt.Printf("Found: %s\n", string(part))
} else {
fmt.Println("Not found")
}
}
Running:
% go run main.go
Found: EW
Go playground

Answer 3

We don't need regex for this problem. You can easily walk through on a slice of rune and check the current character with unicode.IsDigit(), if it's a digit: return. If it isn't: continue the loop. If there are no numbers: return the argument
Code
package main
import (
"fmt"
"unicode"
)
func UntilDigit(r []rune) []rune {
var i int
for _, v := range r {
if unicode.IsDigit(v) {
return r[0:i]
}
i++
}
return r
}
func main() {
fmt.Println(string(UntilDigit([]rune("E2 9NZ"))))
fmt.Println(string(UntilDigit([]rune("N29DZ"))))
fmt.Println(string(UntilDigit([]rune("EW29DZ"))))
}
Playground link

Answer 4

I think the best option is to use the index returned from strings.IndexAny which will return the first index of any character in a string.
func BeforeNumbers(str string) string {
value := strings.IndexAny(str,"0123456789")
if value >= 0 && value <= len(str) {
return str[:value]
}
return str
}
Will slice the string and return the subslice up to (but not including) the first character that's in the string "0123456789" which is any number.
Way later edit:
It would probably be better to use IndexFunc rather than IndexAny:
func BeforeNumbers(str string) string {
indexFunc := func(r rune) bool {
return r >= '0' && r <= '9'
}
value := strings.IndexFunc(str,indexFunc)
if value >= 0 && value <= len(str) {
return str[:value]
}
return str
}
This is more or less equivalent to the loop version, and eliminates a search over a long string to check for a match every character from my previous answer. But I think it looks cleaner than the loop version, which is obviously a manner of taste.

Answer 5

The code below will continue grabbing characters until it reaches a digit.
int i = 0;
String string2test = "EW29DZ";
String stringOutput = "";
while (!Character.isDigit(string2test.charAt(i)))
{
stringOutput = stringOutput + string2test.charAt(i);
i++;
}