firstline

Firstline is a term used to designate the opening line of a text. It can refer to the literal first line of a poem, story, article, or script, and is often central to stylistic analysis, indexing, and user interface previews. In literary analysis, the first line can establish voice, mood, setting, or theme, and scholars may study how opening lines function as hooks or foreshadowing devices.

In publishing and information retrieval, the first line is sometimes stored or displayed as a teaser or preview in catalogs, search results, or metadata. It can aid quick identification of a document and may be used in search indexing as a lightweight descriptor.

In computing and software, some programming libraries or tools implement a function or method named firstline (or similar) that returns the first line from a block of text or a file. The exact behavior varies: it may trim leading whitespace, preserve or remove newline characters, and may support different text encodings and line-ending conventions.

Because line boundaries depend on the text’s formatting and the conventions of a given language or medium, the concept of a first line is inherently contextual. What counts as the first line in poetry may differ from prose, and in multilingual or encoded texts, handling of line breaks can affect how firstline is defined or extracted.

See also: first sentence, opening line, teaser.