Link in Dynamic Text from external file

Greetings all,
I'm having a problem. I'm using xml to pull external text files into a dynamic text field. I'm using the loadVars & "content=" method. My text field is set to htmlText.
In the external file that gets pulled in, there is this line:
come see my new show <a href='http://www.google.com/'> Click Here</a>

As you can see there is a space both before the opening <a> & before the Click Here, yet neither of them are recognized. All other spaces throughout the file are preserved, but whenever there is a <a> link in the line, it disregards the spaces surrounding & within the link code, so the line rendered looks like:
come see my new showClick Here

Any ideas how to preserve that space?
&nbsp; or &#160; both don't work...

It should have a space (I use includes and never ran into that problem) but you might try

Code:

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come see my new show&nbsp;<a href="http://www.google.com/">Click Here</a>

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to see if that might help

nope, I tried both:

Code:

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  and  

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...I discovered that it had something to do with the font size - anything below 15 would omit the space directly preceding a link tag (but not the one following it), though any size above 15 preserved the spaces. I didn't want to raise my font size above 15, so what I did is just make a new CSS class where the text was white (the background of the site is white) & put:

Code:

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<span class='linkSpacer'>...</span>

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before the links. It's a hack, but it works!