mysql wierd spacing issue

[james2010]

I've done a script that converts spaces to '&ampnbsp;' then inserts them into a mysql table when users submit a form. And they can edit this later. But for some reason I'm ending up with á characters in my database in the place of spaces. I have no idea why this is happening and when I pull the data from the database it just becomes a normal space but I'm unable to read it using the str_replace(" ", " ", $query['text']);

If anyone has any idea as to what's going on I would really appreciate your help because this has really been bothering me. Thanks~

[OctoberAsh]

If you don't mind my asking, what need are you fulfilling replacing spaces this way? Also, what's the data type of the field you're doing this substitution on?

[james2010]

I'm doing a news site where you can post articles and it will display them in html for people visiting the web site. And I need to convert spaces to   so html won't ignore multiple spaces. I've determined it's not the database that's doing this but rather the process of posting   in a form when the user updates. So I replaced   with a space when updating and it seems to work fine. I'm still curious as to what ' ' becomes when it is posted through a form.

[OctoberAsh]

Ok, two thoughts on this. I'm not sure if they'll lead you to your answer, or to more confusion - if the latter, my apologies in advance.

1) Still not sure of the data type of the field you're storing this in, but generally doing this substitution is adding a ton more characters into your table than you probably want. I'd recommend storing the text 'as is' (after you've stripped slashes, validated, etc.), and having your PHP do the work to display the text instead.

and, if you still want to go that route,...

2) try & amp;nbsp (removing the space between the & and the "amp" - the vB code wouldn't display it properly, sorry) as your substituion character set. My thought is that the ampersand char isn't getting parsed properly when it's passed back to PHP without the semi-colon.

Hope this helps!

[james2010]

Thanks, I think your first method is the best way to go for this. 😃