All,
Today I happened to be in a long boring meeting to discuss the process flow of a project. The presentation was accompanied by some really pitiful code. Pitiful in the sense that the language was not rich, not in the sense that it was bad code. Indeed, there were quite a few creative solutions given the limits of the language (the || operator is used to concatenate strings).

One such problem was to detect if there was any alpha [a-zA-Z] characters in a string where the language didn't support regexes. The equivalent solution using Perl syntax is: 

if ( lc $foo eq uc $foo ) { }

[download]
I came up with a few alternatives (walking the string) but they all seemed "wrong" given the current solution.

Challenge:
What is the most creative solution for detecting the presence of alpha chars [a-zA-Z] in a string without the use of regexes that you can come up with?

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Challenge - Creative Way To Detect Alpha Characters by Limbic~Region

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.