How to display spaces in between text in asp.net c# html

I have a weird problem, I am getting data straight from the database into a data source. The data is binded in a repeater with link buttons.

The problem I am having is that the data in the database might have multiple spaces in the middle of the string however when being displayed on the front end only space is being shown. After thinking about it this is standard HTML behavior to remove spaces, I would have assumed that asp.net would have handled this with the rendering of the web开发者_运维问答page. What is also happening is that when reports are exported to excel it only has 1 space instead of two.

Example:

2 spaces: "South Africa   -   Cape Town"

single spaces: "South Africa - Cape Town"

This is an irrelevant example but my data has real use for multiple spaces.

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You could replace the spaces with  , like this:

string result = myString.Replace(" ", " ");

That would result in the HTML:

"South Africa  -  Cape Town"

Which would render correctly with two spaces.

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Ended Up doing the following:

    Regex spaceRegex = new Regex("\\s{2,}");

    //Only replace subsequent spaces, not all spaces. For example, 
    //"   " (three spaces) becomes "   " (1 space, 2 non-breaking spaces).
    MatchEvaluator matchEvaluator = delegate(Match match)
    {
        StringBuilder spaceStringBuilder = new StringBuilder(" ");
        for (int i = 0; i < match.Value.Length - 1; i++)
        {
            spaceStringBuilder.Append("&nbsp;");
        }
        return spaceStringBuilder.ToString();
    };

    return spaceRegex.Replace(server.HtmlEncode(value), matchEvaluator);
}