Problem with using blank spaces as padding

[ulterior]

Hi, please bear with me - this may be an insanely simple problem, but its one that has stumped me so far.

 

So I'm developing a webapp, it reads results from a MySQL db, formats them into a string, publishes this as xml which is then sent via sms message. However the results need to be divided up so that sentences arent split across text messages - so my code adds x amount of underscore characters after a series of sentences in order to fill up the remaining 140 characters of a sms message (which then allows the next sentences to begin at the start of the next message).

 

So its sort of like "Sentence 1. Sentence 2 is long_____________________Sentence 3. Sentence 4. Sentence 5.______" (except across 140 characters). As produced by:

 

						$q = 0;
						while ($q <= $tofill)
						{
							$blank3 = $blank3 . "_";
							$q=$q+1;
						}

 

Anyway, my problem is that instead of underscores I want to use blank spaces. Again this is probably just a vast oversight on my behalf, but I havent been able to find a way to produce concurrent blank spaces in php. If I change

 

"$blank3 = $blank3 . "_";"

 

to

 

$blank3 = $blank3 . " ";

 

the spaces are collapsed, so instead of 16 underscores I get a single space. Is this just a stupid oversight on my behalf? Surely there is a way of putting multiple spaces into a string....?

[foxtrotwhiskey]

Well PHP shouldn't be messing with your spaces, they should remain intact. But a web browser will automatically turn a consecutive sequence of whitespace into 1 space on the screen. If you were to "View Source" for that page, you should see all of the whitespace intact. If you were noticing this problem after sending an SMS message, perhaps the system that processes the message automatically strips out extra whitespace. I'm not sure exactly how it works. Hope that helps.

[n3ightjay]

&nbsp ... that will render a blank space when outputted to html .. not sure if that will work when going to xml or sms .... but worth a try ?!?!?