[suspicious - maybe spam] detecting a leading hyphen from post data

I know this is pretty petty, but it is a sunday and I'm missing this for some reason... I'm trying to detect a leading hyphen in an element of an array. I've been using strpos to find strings and if getting 1 as the result, I know it was at the beginning of the string. However, "-", "\-", nor "/^-/" give me a hit? Could someone throw me a bone here? Larry