Regex problem

Hi there, I am camping with a little regular expressions problem... Problem: I want to check if $variable begins with a * (star), and it doesn't matter if it starts with plenty of spaces... My solution: ereg("^[:space:]*\*",$variable) But, it doesn't seem to work with the space part... The regex: ereg("^\*",$variable) does work, but that doesn't include spaces at the start... How can I extend this one so that it doesn't matter if there are a lot of spaces at the begin? Thanks in advance, Leon Mergen