I have a form text field that is being populated with a default value. I would like to clear the value and enter white space to assert that the expected validation occurs. I am using Selenium RC and the PHPUnit Selenium extension. How can I achieve this?

Note: I have already tried doing these, but they do not work:

```
$this->type('FirstName', "  "); //spaces
$this->type('FirstName', "\t"); //tab character

```

They clear the value from the field, but they do not enter the white space into the field.

**Update:** I found that [if you are using Selenium IDE, you can type white space by using their `${space}` variable](http://release.seleniumhq.org/selenium-core/1.0/reference.html#whitespace) but this does not work when using Selenium RC and the PHPUnit Selenium extension.