Yes , i tried with NEW YORK SUMMARY with 2 spaces , it replaces multiple spaces with one space.
Issue #1: Why would your validations depend upon the display text of a select option? That's pretty fragile. I'd revisit this design.
the populated dropdown , comes directly from database columns. so NEW YORK SUMMARY (with 2 spaces) comes directly from tables and I am checking my displayed value against the table value. If displayed value's space is preserved , It makes the validation straight forward.
Perhaps you could try character entitites?
I don't know what kind of values I might recieve, so I can't use &npbsp