showing mulitple spaces in the text of dropdowns

[completerookie]

I want to be able to create psuedo columns in some dropdowns (<select> statements) for a heavy database driven website at work (not actinic)

googling and using the word "select" etc gives so many red-herrings it becomes hard work chasing down a good example.

Does anyone have any pointers to websites that shows me how I can code such drop downs . - Ive tried using css, but as with all html, the multiple spaces get stripped down to the single space and the use of &nbsp; seems not to work in select statements

example values are

col1         col2     col3  col4
col1aaa    col2bb     col3  col4

I had considered the use of ascii(160) - the equivilent of &nbsp; but no joy there either,

another one I had thought of is to create a "pretend" dropdown that is actually a popup (or should that read popdown) of the values using some clever css (any pointer to this type of functionality could also help to save me re-inventing the wheel)

anyone got any ideas please.

[acompton]

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp

Scroll down for examples of form elements like drop-down lists

[completerookie]

perhaps I've missed something on the link, but they seem like simple traditional dropdown's - its the psuedo column-like concept within the dropdown I'm trying to achieve and I can't see this on page you've linked to.

[acompton]

I probably mis-interpreted your post.

[acompton]

Apologies. I mis-interpreted your post and gave you a basic guide to selection controls.

[completerookie]

no probs, thanks anyway