render tab characters in html

Question

I have to render some text to a web page. The text is coming from sources outside my control and it is formatted using \n and\t

Now \n can be replaced by a <br> but what about \t. A brief search reveals there is no way to render tab characters in html, bu there has to be a workaround. Anyone?

Answer 1

replace \t with      

Each space you want will be a  

Answer 2

Why not just wrap the content in a <pre> tag? This will handle the \n as well as the \t characters.

Answer 3

If you're already replacing line breaks, why not do the same for tabs...?

str_replace("\t", '    ', $text);

Answer 4

An alternative to the non-breaking space would be the em space (  or  ). It is usually rendered as a longer space, if that is an advantage.