Forum OpenACS Q&A: Problems with creation of an element of datatype and widget richtext

I want to make an edit page that has a form element of type and widget richtext. I get the data of the element in a variable and has all the information that I need.
I made the element like this:

element create message body \
    -datatype richtext \
    -widget richtext \
    -value  "$a" \
    -html {rows 20 cols 60 wrap soft} \
    -label "Body"

the variable "a" has for example "hello to everyone"
but when I see the page in the text area only appears "hello". Does anyone knows if the datatype and widget richtext have this problem with spaces because, if I change the datatype to text and the widget to textarea the value appears correctly.
Any help?