how to use regular expression to remove a prefix string with all 0s.

I have a set of strings, some of them are prefixed with 0, and others are not. For instance, there have five strings:

012AB AB0 00230 0045 abc

I want to remove all of the 0s if they are the prefix of a string. If a string does not have 0s at the prefix position, then the string will be kept the same.

Therefore, the above strings should be transferred into

12AB AB0 230 45 abc

How to implement the above functionality using regular expression?

Answer 1

[Andrei Bobrov]

s ='012AB AB0 00230 0045 abc'; 

out = regexprep(s,'\<0*','')

[liangjian]

Thanks, it works well. May I ask how to understand your regular expression of \<0*

[Walter Roberson]

\< means "beginning of a word" http://www.mathworks.com/help/techdoc/matlab_prog/f0-42649.html#f0-42983

0* means zero or more occurrences of the character '0'

Better would be

\<0+

which would require 1 or more 0's -- there is no point going through the replacement part of the code if there was not at least one 0.

[Walter Roberson]

Updated link: http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/regular-expressions.html#f0-42983