BUG: fix nbsp for html formatting

doc/source/whatsnew/v3.0.0.rst

@@ -627,6 +627,7 @@ I/O
 - Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.to_stata` when writing :class:`DataFrame` and ``byteorder=`big```. (:issue:`58969`)
 - Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.to_string` that raised ``StopIteration`` with nested DataFrames. (:issue:`16098`)
 - Bug in :meth:`HDFStore.get` was failing to save data of dtype datetime64[s] correctly (:issue:`59004`)
+- Bug in :meth:`HTMLFormatter._write_cell_` which ignored the spacing between strings. (:issue:`59876`)
 - Bug in :meth:`read_csv` causing segmentation fault when ``encoding_errors`` is not a string. (:issue:`59059`)
 - Bug in :meth:`read_csv` raising ``TypeError`` when ``index_col`` is specified and ``na_values`` is a dict containing the key ``None``. (:issue:`57547`)
 - Bug in :meth:`read_csv` raising ``TypeError`` when ``nrows`` and ``iterator`` are specified without specifying a ``chunksize``. (:issue:`59079`)

pandas/io/formats/html.py

@@ -195,6 +195,8 @@ def _write_cell(
             esc = {}
 
         rs = pprint_thing(s, escape_chars=esc).strip()
+        # replace spaces betweens strings with non-breaking spaces
+        rs = rs.replace("  ", "  ")
 
         if self.render_links and is_url(rs):
             rs_unescaped = pprint_thing(s, escape_chars={}).strip()

pandas/tests/io/formats/test_format.py

@@ -375,12 +375,29 @@ def test_repr_min_rows(self):
             (None, "{:.3f}", "None"),
             ("", "{:.2f}", ""),
             (112345.6789, "{:6.3f}", "112345.679"),
+            ("foo      foo", None, "foo      foo"),
+            (" foo", None, "foo"),
+            (
+                "foo foo       foo",
+                None,
+                "foo foo       foo",
+            ),  # odd no.of spaces
+            (
+                "foo foo    foo",
+                None,
+                "foo foo    foo",
+            ),  # even no.of spaces
         ],
-    )
+    )  # test float formatting and nbsp in strings
     def test_repr_float_formatting_html_output(
         self, data, format_option, expected_values
     ):
-        with option_context("display.float_format", format_option.format):
+        if format_option is not None:
+            with option_context("display.float_format", format_option.format):
+                df = DataFrame({"A": [data]})
+                html_output = df._repr_html_()
+                assert expected_values in html_output
+        else:
             df = DataFrame({"A": [data]})
             html_output = df._repr_html_()
             assert expected_values in html_output