State Machine Design Pattern

[Pho Tek]

I need a state machine to track the character tokens that I read in. Basically I have an XML stream that's going to be written to a Writer object. I am writing a FilterWriter that will look for the XML prolog string:
< ?xml version='1.0'?>
and filter that out.
Do you have any pointers to sample code for a state machine in Java or maybe a design pattern for it? Thanks all.
Pho
(edited by Cindy to add space in XML tag so that it will display)
[This message has been edited by Cindy Glass (edited April 23, 2001).]