How to get a tab character

Question

In HTML  there is no character for a tab  but I am confused as to why I can copy and paste one here        You can t see the full width of it  but if you click to edit my question  you will see the character   If I can copy and paste a tab character  there should be a unicode equivalent that can be coded into html  I know it doesn t exist  but this is a mystery I ve never been able to grasp   So my question is  why is there not a unicode character for a tab even if I can copy and paste it

User · Answer

Posting another alternative to be more complete. When I tried the "pre" based answers, they added extra vertical line breaks as well.

Each tab can be converted to a sequence non-breaking spaces which require no wrapping.

"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"

This is not recommended for repeated/extensive use within a page. A div margin/padding approach would appear much cleaner.

User · Answer

Tab is  HT   or character number 9  in the unicode library

User · Answer

Try  amp emsp   as per the docs       The character entities  amp ensp  and  amp emsp  denote an en space and an em   space respectively  where an en space is half the point size and an em   space is equal to the point size of the current font  For fixed pitch   fonts  the user agent can treat the en space as being equivalent to A   space character  and the em space as being equuivalent to two space   characters    Docs link   https   www w3 org MarkUp html3 specialchars html

User · Answer

As mentioned  for efficiency reasons sequential spaces are consolidated into one space the browser actually displays  Remember what the ML in HTML stand for  It s a Mark-up Language  designed to control how text is displayed   not whitespace  p  Still  you can pretend the browser respects tabs since all the TAB does is prepend 4 spaces  and that s easy with CSS   either in line like        lt div style  padding-left 4 00em   gt Indenented text  lt  div gt    Or as a regular class in a style sheet   tabbed  padding-left 4 00em     Then the HTML might look like    lt p gt regular paragraph regular paragraph regular paragraph lt  p gt   lt p class  tabbed  gt Indented text Indented text Indented text lt  p gt   lt p gt regular paragraph regular paragraph regular paragraph lt  p gt

User · Answer

I use  lt span style  display  inline-block  width  2ch   gt  amp  9  lt  span gt  for a two characters wide tab

User · Answer

put it in between  lt pre gt  lt  pre gt  tags then use this characters  amp  9   it would not work without the  lt pre gt  lt  pre gt  tags

User · Answer

Sure there s an entity for tabs    amp  9     The tab is ASCII character 9  or Unicode U 0009    However  just like literal tabs  ones you type in to your text editor   all tab characters are treated as whitespace by HTML parsers and collapsed into a single space except those within a  lt pre gt  block  where literal tabs will be rendered as 8 spaces in a monospace font

[html] How to get a tab character?

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