What does your Java code look like? You might have to escape the \'s and
other special characters, I myself am very new to Java but escaping of
characters is done in most programming languages.

Bastiaan

Java Matcher "Attempts to match the entire region against the pattern."
(from the  javadocs). The search is anchored. So the only lines that
match the regular expression "^[^#\ \t]" are those that contain exactly
one character that is not pound, space or tab.

I am resisting the temptation to give you the exact pattern you are
looking for.

Hi!

Here's the code snippet that prints all lines that are not comments and do not start with whitespace.
The input is a String (more general: CharSequence) containing the entire file content. DO NOT USE FOR LARGE FILES!

/* BEGIN */
String testLine = "This\n is\na\n#test";

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("^[^\\s#].*$", Pattern.MULTILINE);
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(testLine);
while (matcher.find()) {
  String l = matcher.group();
  System.out.println(l);
}
/* END */

In your case, it might be better to read lines using the BufferedReader's "readLine" method and just test if it starts with
whitespace or "#":

BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(yourFile));
try {
 String line = null;
 while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
   if (line.length() == 0) continue; /* skip line in case it is empty (is this correct?) */

   char c = line.charAt(0);
   if ((c == '#') || Character.isWhitespace(c)) continue;
   System.out.println(line);
 }
} finally {
 reader.close();
}

Best regards,
 Tex