php ignore the first whitespaces

[Dennis_Gull]

Hey, I have a text in my mySQL db that look like this:
<whitespace>hello, this is
some text...
And when i try to output it I get this:
Hello, this is
some text..

I already use nl2br for row change but im not sure how to keep the whitespaces before any text appear on the row, is there a function for that or will i have to convert all the whitespace to &nbsp?

edit:
apparently this code also ignore the whitespace in the start of a row
<whitespace> is just a space.

[Twey]

You'll have to convert them.

str_replace(' ', ' ', $tring);

[Dennis_Gull]

okay, thanks for the reply.

[Twey]

Oh, and note that it's HTML that causes the whitespace to be collapsed, not PHP. Always check the source of your page when debugging.

[james438]

I thought that looked familiar. I'm pretty sure I tried that once before, so I tried it again just now on my testing page with the following code:

<php $text="          t            t";
str_replace(' ', '&nbsp;', $text);
echo "$text";
?> 

but all I got was "t t" with no space before the first "t" and only one between the two t's. That is why I started using:

<php $text="          t            t";
$text=preg_replace('/((\040){2,2})/',"&nbsp;&nbsp;",$text);
echo "$text";
?> 

[james438]

This is a bit late, but I thought it was relevant. In my last post I said that

<php $text="          t            t"; 
str_replace(' ', '&nbsp;', $text); 
echo "$text"; 
?>

didn't work. I should have used

<php $text="          t            t"; 
$text=str_replace(' ', '&nbsp;', $text); 
echo "$text"; 
?>

Just posting in case anyone doesn't see the error.