Displaying Blank Spaces

Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 7:07 pm

Does anyone know how to display blanks spaces without the use   or tables? What's perfect is surrounding my text (including <a ..> and <img ..> tags) with <pre></pre> tags but that's not HTML 4.01 compliant.

The number of blank spaces will be variable based on the length of a file name (for example).

"file.name (n-number of spaces) description, et al"

Thanks.

Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 7:22 pm

I don't follow exactly what you mean there but why not use <br /> after the tags
or use nl2br() both?

Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 7:49 pm

I suppose this is more of an html question than anything. If I know the proper html code I can code my php function.

If you create a little html file that contains the following line:

Code:

<pre>  <a href="http://alink.whatever">asdf</a>                    something</pre>

it will print the blanks spaces after "asdf". However, this is not HTML 4.01 compliant since the <a ..> tag is located within the <pre>..</pre> tags.

I need to be able to have a browser display the blanks but I don't want to display the messy   stuff or use tables.

I hope I explained that a little better.

Thanks.

Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 8:24 pm

I see well like in a comment for instance if you save it to the DB and then use $comment = nl2br($comment);
echo "$comment";
before you echo or print it out to the browser it will preserve the formating as far as the spaces and line returns go. (Something like <pre would.

Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 8:52 pm

That doesn't do what I want. I tested it using the following code:

Code:

<?php





$testtest = "this has              blanks      .\n";


$testtest = nl2br( $testtest );





echo $testtest;





?>

and it produced this in the browser:

Code:

this has blanks .

The <pre> tag preserves the blanks in between the words and displays them in the browser. I need the blanks to be displayed in the browser like this:

Code:

this has              blanks      .

Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 9:42 pm

Yeah I don't see any way around using   if the output is html.
$text=str_replace(" ", " ", $text);
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Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 10:10 pm

I'll use it but it makes the html messy. Oh well. Thanks for the input. It always helps to bounce ideas off others.

My spacer function I wrote for spacing text on a line:

Code:

function spacer ( $f_length ) {


   $test_space = 40 - $f_length;


   for ( $i = 1; $i <= $test_space; $i++) {


      $space_man .= "&nbsp;";


   }


   return $space_man;


}

$f_length is the number of characters in the file name returned by strlen() in the calling function and 40 is the character position I want the next text to start.

Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 10:16 pm

Thats really nice I can think of a lot of sloppy forms that would benefit from something like that.

::: Looks around to make sure no one is pointing finger this way:::

Posted: Mon Jan 31, 2005 10:22 pm

Ha ha ha! Thanks.
Smile