How To Get Width Of A Space Char

I wrote the following function to get a font metrics table and it works for all printable characters except spaces. Does anyone know how I could get the width of a space char with known font, size etc...?

I tried several different variations on the "node.style.whiteSpace" line and also tried using an html entity   (which gave me the width of the string ' ') but nothing seems to work. All I'm getting for spaces is zero width.

javascript Code:

function JSFontMetrics(inFont, inSize, inWeight, inVariant, inStyle)
{
var node= document.createElement('span');
var text= document.createTextNode('');
var width = 0;

[Code].....