Newbie question - regarding anchoring

[gautham]

Hi,

I am new to Ragel. I am trying out different regular expressions to
gain more familiariaty.

I am unable to write a regex which is matched only when it is found at
the beginning of the input string. For example, the regex should match
"hello world start" and not match "world hello start".

I tried using "^hello" - similar to lex/awk, but the "^" seems to be
interpreted literally.

Thanks in advance.

-gautham