Regex to replace leading spaces of str

Anon

I have a string with one or more leading spaces and I would like to replace 'each' of those spaces with an  

I can replace all the leading spaces with a single   I can also replace every space in the string with the  

However, my goal of replacing each and every 'leading' space with the &nbsp elludes me.

It would be great if ltrim was more like this:

ltrim($string [str $replacement_string=""];

Any suggestions?
Chuckc

Anon

looks like none of the important stuff made it to the post... try again?

Anon

Actually, every place that seems to have magically disapeared was an &nbsp;

Basically, I have a string (a bunch of strings really) and they may or may not have leading spaces. If they do have leading spaces, I want to replace 'each' leading space with an HTML 'non breaking space' &nbsp;

So far, I can replace all the leading spaces with one &nbsp; OR I can replace every space in the entire string with the &nbsp;. Still, no luck doing what I want to do.

One more note, I'm sure I could do what I want with a loop through each character of the string but I think a regular expression would be faster.

Any thoughts would be great.
chuckc

Anon

replace space with   if at beggining of string or only preceeded by other  

ereg_replace(
"^{([[:space:]]|(&nbsp😉+[[:space:]])",}
"\2 ",
$string);

ok i didnt test this, but it just might work. let me know how it goes...

-paul
http://xhawk.net