Question

need help transforming the following string " Hello I have blanks to the left" into something like "     Hello I have blanks to the left". Have tried matching multiple blanks to the left but it only replaces all of the blanks with a single "&nbsp". Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

There are a few ways of doing this. My preferred way would be:

preg_replace_callback("/^ +/",function($m) {return str_repeat(" ",strlen($m));},$input);

Note that if you have PHP older than 5.3, you will need to use create_function instead of directly putting an anonymous callback in there.