22 Sep, 2011 

Using a non-breaking space in UTF-8 documents

I’m pedantic when it comes to displaying nested items in a dropdown. I like to ensure that sub-items are suitably indented. My preference is to do this using spaces only. However, the problem in HTML is that multiple spaces are considered as one. Which blows this out of the water.

Why not just use a non-breaking space character? Duh!

You mean something like the output of PHP’s chr(160)? That was my first thought. However – this character is not part of the UTF-8 character set (my default character set); and is actually a part of the ISO-8859-1 character set.

Thankfully, I stumbled across a great snippet that outputs a UTF-8 suitable non-breaking space:

echo mb_convert_encoding(chr(160), 'UTF-8', 'HTML-ENTITIES');

I know it is possible to insert an   into the HTML. However, this was for use in a CakePHP project – where the form items are automagically generated, and using the   in multiple places became a bit tricky.

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2 Responses to “Using a non-breaking space in UTF-8 documents”

  1. Mark Garbers 23 Sep, 2011 at 11:10 #

    Mmm, what about using CSS to style the sub-items in the list? Surely that’s a far better way of doing it as it means an HTML-monkey can change it if required, rather than delving into the PHP framework? KISS?

  2. Geoff Garbers 26 Sep, 2011 at 12:24 #

    This was actually more of a solution that I found for mobile sites – where the CSS support isn’t that advanced (at least, in terms of South African devices).

    But for web browsers – CSS would definitely be better :)

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