Question

I know modern browsers remove most space chars and ‘&nbsp’; characters insider a paragraph element. But is there a way to get the browser to not remove the space chars?

Maybe a CSS attribute, or HTML doctype to use?

Or maybe my last resort is to use javascript to convert every 4 space characters to tabs?

Example of the text I want to display:

<p>There    should    be    gaps    of    4    chars    tween    each    word</p>

If my only resort is Javascript; can you tell me if my regular expression will correctly change any ” ” char(that occurs twice or more) with an “_” char?

var p = document.getElementById("myP");
var con = p.innerHTML;
con = con.replace("[ ]{2,}", "_");
p.innerHTML = con;

Answer 1

Is there any reason using <pre> tags wouldn’t be suitable for this? Because that’s what it sounds like you need.

Output (wrapped your content above in <pre></pre> tags):

There    should    be    gaps    of    4    chars    tween    each    word

Also, <pre> tags can still be styled.