Restricting instances in data

[mouse]

I'm making a small message board where peeps can buy/sell or place wanted ads, being incapable of installing 3rd party scripts I'm coding it myself ...actually learnin' stuff too

Two things:

1) spaces in data, how do I keep 'em as spaces rather than regurgitating them as %20 or whatever?

2) I'd like to restrict smilie useage in a similar way to this site, limiting to 8 or so per post, my smilie code is like so: [smilie=1], [smilie=2] and so on.

[mordred]

I don't get the part with the %20 as substitutes for spaces. How does that happen - do you treat the data with urlencode()?

As for the instances of smiley code, you have a look at substr_count(), I think that does exactly what you want.
http://za2.php.net/manual/en/function.substr-count.php

Use it like

PHP Code:

$numberOfSmileys = substr_count($data, "[smilie=");
if ($numberOfSmileys > 8) {
   echo "that's too much, I'm afraid.";
}