title: Is it faster to find if a character is a letter, or parse and integer?
body: <p><strong>Question 1:</strong></p>
  <p>I am taking text files and formatting them into the correct format to use their data. The problem is that if a line starts with a number, it actually should be in the first line above it with a name ( or a set of letters). So I want to know if it is faster to test the first char in the line to see if it is an int by parsing it and seeing if that doesn't fail, or do char.IsLetter to see if it is an alphabetic character?  I assume there is overhead in a failed parse, even surrounded in a try, and most of the lines do start with a letter, so I am not sure about the speed.</p>
  <p><strong>Question 2:</strong></p>
  <p>if char.IsLetter is faster, what would be the easiest way to handle blank character (&quot;&quot;) that appear at the beginning of some lines? I know that int.Parse handles them, so it is harder to figure out how to handle if thats the first character.</p>