Maintaining white space in html select tag

I have a list of strings that I would like to display in a HTML select object. The strings look something like :

id - name - description

I would like the fields to align however. In PHP I'm using

sprintf ("%4s%10s%20s", $id, $name, $description开发者_运维百科);

which works fine. The problem is the multiple spaces is compacted to 1 space in the select list. I tried using the pre and white-space CSS properties of the select box, but it has no effect. Any suggestions?

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you have to use   instead, they are non-breaking spaces so it won't collapse.

You could do:

str_replace(" ", " ", sprintf("%4s%10s%20s", $id, $name, $description));

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Use CSS to set the font of the options to a monospaced font. Use   instead of spaces (you can use str_pad() instead of sprintf()).

http://us3.php.net/str_pad

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Replace spaces with   HTML entity.

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You may have to replace the spaces with   to make this work correctly; though part of me thinks there's a much better to do this but my HTML-fu is weak...

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Wrap it in the html "code" tag.

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Replace the multiple spaces following each other with non breaking spaces:

 

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Convert spaces to  ?

Try to use   (Non breaking space) is that what your looking for?