How to determine whether a String starts with a vowel or consonant

[JonVici]

This is a short function for determining whether your string starts with a vowel or a consonant.

I recently had a usecase for this when working on some text generation and thought I would publish a simple function on here for free use, incase someone else would find it of use here.

local function FirstIsVowel(str) 
	return str:match("^[AEIOUaeiou]") and true  -- cast to bool
end


Example use : 
if FirstIsVowel(Fruit) == true then
print("There is an" .. Fruit)  -- The first letter in the string is a vowel
else
 print ("There is a" .. Fruit) -- The first lettter in the string is a consonant
end

Here, Banana starts with a consonant and thus gets the output “There is a Banana”, Apple on the other starts with a vowel and gets the output “There is an Apple”.

[Rile_ey (Riley)]

Whether or not you use an or a depends on the sound of the first character.
If it starts with a vowel sound you use an, if it starts with a consonant sound you use a.

This is why you would say “a unicorn” and not “an unicorn”.

This is a cool use of pattern matching though

[JonVici]

Well yes, I’m aware of this, the example usecase listed was just that, an example. The broader functionality listed works as it should, but you’re correct in what you’re saying.