Please forgive me I am totally wrong, but it seems to me like you are tying to reinvent the wheel. Have you ever tried Gofish?

>Have been trying to construct a Regular Expression pattern to find a string that only exists at the beginning of a line, even if there are none or more white spaces before it (either spaces or tabs).
>
>Example text I'm search
>
>

>DEFINE CLASS test
>	PROCEDURE init
>		IF ATC("DEFINE CLASS",x)>0
>		*
>		ENDIF 
>		IF ATC("PROCEDURE",x)>0
>		*
>		ENDIF 
>	ENDPROC
>	PROCEDURE destroy
>	ENDPROC
>ENDDEFINE 
>

>
>If I am look for the "DEFINE CLASS" (ignoring the case), I would like for it to find only the "DEFINE CLASS test". Also, If I am looking for "PROCEDURE", I want it to find only the "PROCEDURE init" and "PROCEDURE destory", not the one in the ATC().
>
>Here is a example of the search code I am trying.
>
>

>RegExp = NEWOBJECT( "_RegExp", "RegExp.vcx" )
>ctext=FILETOSTR("tt.prg")
>? RegExp.execute( ctext, [(\bdefine class\b)], .F., .T.)
>? RegExp.execute( ctext, [(\bprocedure\b)], .F., .T.)
>

>
>I realize I need to be including the '^' (start of line), possibly '\s*' for the white spaces. but when I do include them the query fails to find anything. I only want it to find matches that are at the beginning of the lines.