non breaking space in php

[tolkienarda]

hi all

i writing a script where people can write atricles and the formating must save white space and break lines. the breakline problem has been fixed but about the whitespace problem.
do extra white spaces get deleted when i store them into a mysql database
example
there is a space at the begining of this line
and there are two spaces between those words

i can't seem to get them to display after i pull them from the database now i think i have a solution but it will almost kill me trying to do it.
i just recently learned how to use regular expressions and i was thinking about just searching for any series of spaces (more than one) and then replacing them with   but i think by the time i figure that out i will be nearly dead so if anyone has any ideas on what to do i would greatley appreiate it

eric

[bergy]

Erik,

If you are displaying these articles as HTML the reason why you only get one space is because of the way HTML works - it has nothing to do with your database or PHP. HTML will only show 1 space between characters - so

<b>Here             Are           Spaces</b>

Would appear as:
Here Are Spaces

A quick fix in PHP would be to do this:

$myString = str_replace("  ", "  ", $articleText);

That is the quick and dirty way to do it, notice it looks for and replaces 2 spaces instead of just one. If we were to replace every space with   you'd have what the browser would think was one big long word - meaning no word wrap and a huge horizontal scrollbar :)

Hope that helps!

[tolkienarda]

ok thanks that makes my life way easier

eric