Adding into xml using PHP - php

Question

I want to add triple spacing in my xml but browser is changing triple spacing to single. I have found   to be used to include spacing. I have a tab delimited text file and i am converting it to xml using php. In order to have triple spacing inside my title node i am doing like this.
$xml->startElement('Products');
while ($line = fgetcsv($fp, 0, "\t")) {
$xml->startElement('Product');
//replacing titlesingle space to triple space
$title = str_replace(" ", "   ", $line[1]);
$xml->writeElement('title', $title);
.....
$xml->endElement();
}
$xml->endElement();
}
But is   changed to   and title is something like this
<title>A&#160;&#160;&#160;Test</title>
Basically php is changing & to amp but i want exact   so that i can have triple spacing in the title
<title>A Test</title>
Any help??

Answer 1

It does not change the spacing. But in HTML/XML several whitespaces are usually (not always) rendered as a single space or a linebreak.
#160; is the non breaking space. One of the uses is to separate the parts of a phone number. You don't want one of the spaces in a phone number rendered as a linebreak.
The UTF-8 bytes for this character are \xC2\xA0.
$xml->writeElement('foo', "foo\xC2\xA0&\xC2\xA0bar");
If the XML document is encoding is ASCII, they will get encoded as entities.
$xml = new XMLWriter();
$xml->openMemory();
$xml->startDocument('1.0', 'ASCII');
$xml->writeElement('foo', "foo\xC2\xA0&\xC2\xA0bar");
$xml->endDocument();
echo $xml->outputMemory(TRUE);
Output:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ASCII"?>
<foo>foo & bar</foo>