Here is the solution I found on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2800739/how-to-remove-leading-zeros-from-alphanumeric-text Proposed solution is really cool and short, it is based on regular expressions: Unfortunately, it is regular expressions based solution. So where you are looking for improving your performance  that’s not the ideal solution. Always in such cases it is better to build own small machine state (when … More How to remove leading zeros from alphanumeric text in effective way (Java)