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From: davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu ("John E. Davis")
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Are TABS bad?
Message-ID: <DAVIS.91Mar24225932@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 25 Mar 91 03:59:32 GMT
Sender: news@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu
Reply-To: davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu  (John E. Davis)
Distribution: comp
Organization: "Dept. of Physics, The Ohio State University"
Lines: 25

Hi,

  It seems to me that a tab character in a text file is a bad thing since
there is some ambiguity over what it means.  That is, it depends on the tab
settings of the output device.  Do most programs which deal with tabs in ascii
files assume they are eight column tabs?

  The reason I want to know is that I wrote a program that strips excess
whitespace at the end of lines of text files.  I also made the program convert
tab characters to the proper number of spaces (based on 8 column tabs).
However, based on the length of the output file compared with the input file
it seems that I should have made the program convert excess spaces to tab
characters due to the large number of tabs that appear in text files.

  So my question is: Are tabs bad?  If not then how does one interpret them in
a device independent way?

Thanks,


--
John

  bitnet: davis@ohstpy
internet: davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu