What is the best way to get the first letter from a string in Java, returned as a string of length 1?

Performance wise substring(0, 1) is better as found by following:

    String example = "something";
    String firstLetter  = "";

    long l=System.nanoTime();
    firstLetter = String.valueOf(example.charAt(0));
    System.out.println("String.valueOf: "+ (System.nanoTime()-l));

    l=System.nanoTime();
    firstLetter = Character.toString(example.charAt(0));
    System.out.println("Character.toString: "+ (System.nanoTime()-l));

    l=System.nanoTime();
    firstLetter = example.substring(0, 1);
    System.out.println("substring: "+ (System.nanoTime()-l));

Output:

String.valueOf: 38553
Character.toString: 30451
substring: 8660

Long story short, it probably doesn't matter. Use whichever you think looks nicest.

Longer answer, using Oracle's Java 7 JDK specifically, since this isn't defined at the JLS:

String.valueOf or Character.toString work the same way, so use whichever you feel looks nicer. In fact, Character.toString simply calls String.valueOf (source).

So the question is, should you use one of those or String.substring. Here again it doesn't matter much. String.substring uses the original string's char[] and so allocates one object fewer than String.valueOf. This also prevents the original string from being GC'ed until the one-character string is available for GC (which can be a memory leak), but in your example, they'll both be available for GC after each iteration, so that doesn't matter. The allocation you save also doesn't matter -- a char[1] is cheap to allocate, and short-lived objects (as the one-char string will be) are cheap to GC, too.

If you have a large enough data set that the three are even measurable, substring will probably give a slight edge. Like, really slight. But that "if... measurable" contains the real key to this answer: why don't you just try all three and measure which one is fastest?

String whole = "something";
String first = whole.substring(0, 1);
System.out.println(first);