Question

I have a sentence in PHP that I’ve broken down into its word components using explode.

foreach ($words as $splitword)
{
    echo $splitword;
    /* echo "<a href = 'word.php?word=" . $splitword . "'>" . $splitword . "</a>"; */
    echo " ";
}

What I want to do is make each word clickable, so I echo each word followed by a space. Now, using the code you see above, everything looks fine and natural. However, if I uncomment the commented line, and comment out echo $splitword;, so that I’m now echoing links instead of just the word, things get ugly:

1. echo " " no longer works, I have to use echo "&nbsp"
2. The spaces are very large. Echoing each word without making it a link produces natural spacing, the way it should be. But when I start using the a tag followed by &nbsp, the spaces are about twice as wide.

Any idea why, and what a workaround is?

Answer 1

echo " " does not work because you are writing HTML, which does not parse ” “.
You’ll have to use   like you already discovered.

The extra spacing could be your styling. Check your CSS. If you still don’t find anything strange, add this to your CSS:

a { 
  margin: 0; 
  padding: 0;
}