Java Programming

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out a regex to use in java that would replace each space character at the beginning of the line with a  . I basically want to preserve indenting that someone has done with space characters in an input field.

I'm currently trying:

s.replaceAll("(?<!\\S+) ", "\\&nbsp;")

which works well enough, but will also replace space characters that occur later in the line. I'm curious if there's an approach that will allow a match on ^\\s+ and then allow me to replace each individual space character with a &nbsp;. I basically don't know how to get the count of the number of space characters that matched the regex and then use that in the replace string, if it's possible at all.

Here's an example:

1. hello world
a. good bye
2. hello world
a. good bye
b. good bye

becomes

1. hello world
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a. good bye
2. hello world
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;a. good bye
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;b. good bye


Thanks,
Don