How to remove leading zeros from alphanumeric text?

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Regex is the best tool for the job; what it should be depends on the problem specification. The following removes leading zeroes, but leaves one if necessary (i.e. it wouldn’t just turn "0" to a blank string).

s.replaceFirst("^0+(?!$)", "")

The ^ anchor will make sure that the 0+ being matched is at the beginning of the input. The (?!$) negative lookahead ensures that not the entire string will be matched.

Test harness:

String[] in = {
    "01234",         // "[1234]"
    "0001234a",      // "[1234a]"
    "101234",        // "[101234]"
    "000002829839",  // "[2829839]"
    "0",             // "[0]"
    "0000000",       // "[0]"
    "0000009",       // "[9]"
    "000000z",       // "[z]"
    "000000.z",      // "[.z]"
};
for (String s : in) {
    System.out.println("[" + s.replaceFirst("^0+(?!$)", "") + "]");
}

See also

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