title: regex: matching phrases without a > or white space
body: <p>I'm parsing some html using regex and I want to match lines which start with a word without any html tags while also removing the white space. Using c# regex my first pattern was:</p>
  
  <pre><code>pattern = @"^\s*([^&lt;])";
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which attempts to grab all the white space and then capture any non '&lt;' characters. Unfortunately if the line is all white space before the first '&lt;' this returns the last white space character before the '&lt;'. I would like this to fail the match.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>