CSS - Underline text but ignore the spaces

Question

I have a couple of links that have a margin-left of 3px. These links are underlined and look like that:

<a href='#'>
    test
</a>

Unfortunately, there are spaces inside the link and I'm not able to remove these space since I don't have access to the HTML code. These spaces are also underlined, which I'm not happy with. Is there any way to remove them without changing the HTML?

Here is a fiddle that shows my problem: http://jsfiddle.net/e8quz/

Update:
Here is a picture, what I want it to look like:

Answer 1

The spaces come from the line-breaks (well-known from the display:inline-block problematic).

So make your a elements display: block and float them to the left.

DEMO

PS: The display:block is "redundant", as float normally already sets the display property of the respective element to "block". But it do no harm ...!