Displaying text values containing multiple spaces

Anon

Anyone know a way of preserving spaces when displaying text values in a page:

For example, if I have a database entry with the following:
(NOTE: I'm having to represent spaces with the - character as I type this as these forum pages have the same problem as I do in my pages🙂

1.-ooh
2.----------er
3.--------------------missus

then when I pull this value from my DB and display it then I am shown:

1.-ooh
2.-er
3.-missus

Is there a function that will swap my blank spaces for something that will display ok through HTML?
I'm already using nl2br() to preserve newlines, and I've tried using the str_replace to swap " " for "&nbsp" but this only replaces one space and doesn't do the trick.

Thanks for any help,
B

Anon

A bit more info:

I just tried doing this:

echo str_replace(" ", "&nbsp", $VALUE);

This half-works... it took that my actual text value of

3.<10spaces>Missus

and output:

3.<9spaces>&nbspMissus

unfortunately the final &nbsp gets shoved up against my text and I end up with the
&nbsp getting displayed...... grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Anon

my last posting got kippered by these forum pages:

it should have read :

I just tried doing this:

echo str_replace(" ", "\&nbsp", $VALUE);

This half-works... it took that my actual text value of

3.<10spaces>Missus

and output:

3.<9spaces>\&nbspMissus

unfortunately the final &nbsp gets shoved up against my text and I end up with the
&nbsp getting displayed...... grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Anon

  ends with a ;

Second, you don't need to escape the & with a slash \ in str_replace.

That may help.

Anon

Also you could just do a <pre> tag before and after your text. <PRE> will preserve your formatting.