Tabs to spaces

Why a TAB causes trouble

The tab character is not a width: it's a jump to the next column, and how wide that column is gets decided by whatever program is showing the text. Your editor may draw it 4 wide, the terminal 8, a website's comment box swallows it entirely and another editor shows it 2 wide. That's why the same text, perfectly aligned on your screen, arrives at the other end as a staircase or all bunched up.

What this page does

Every tab becomes the spaces needed to reach the next column, as an editor does: with width 4 the tab stops fall every four columns, so «ab» followed by a tab becomes «ab» plus two spaces, and «abc» plus just one. That way the text looks exactly as you saw it in the editor, and from then on the same everywhere, because a space is a space anywhere. The width can be 2, 4 or 8: 4 is the most common and the one Python's official style guide (PEP 8) prescribes, 8 is the terminal's. Nothing else is touched: lines, accents, punctuation and special characters stay identical.

The case where it does NOT help

If you copied a table from Excel or Google Sheets, the columns are separated by one TAB each. Here they stay aligned as long as every value is shorter than the chosen width; a longer value pushes the rest of the line to the next column and the table goes crooked, exactly as it does in the editor. A width of 8 helps with short values, but for a real table the right way is to paste it into a spreadsheet, and to do that properly there is CSV to Excel.

Several clean-ups at once, in a fixed order

Below the box you will find all ten clean-ups of this family, and you can tick as many as you like: each page starts with its own already ticked. The program is the same on all ten, so the same text with the same boxes gives the same result on whichever page you paste it.

The order does not depend on which boxes you tick, and it is the order you see them in: first the characters (emojis, accents, numbers, punctuation), then the spaces inside each line (tabs, indentation, extra spaces), then whole lines (blank and duplicate) and last of all joining everything into one line. So a line that is left empty once the emojis are gone disappears with the blank lines, and two lines that become identical once the spaces are gone count as duplicates.

The sister pages, each with its own box already ticked: Remove extra spaces, Remove indentation, Remove blank lines, Remove duplicate lines, Remove emojis, Remove accents, Remove punctuation, Remove numbers and Text on one line.

Nearby tools

If your problem is instead double spaces and lines ending with one space too many, there is Remove extra spaces; to strip the indent at the start of every line, Remove indents. To replace anything else, tabs included, the general road is Find and replace.