How to get a tab character?
HtmlHtml Problem Overview
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?
Html Solutions
Solution 1 - Html
Sure there's an entity for tabs:
	
(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 <pre> block, where literal tabs will be rendered as 8 spaces in a monospace font.
Solution 2 - Html
Try  
as per the docs :
> The character entities   and   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
Solution 3 - Html
put it in between <pre></pre> tags then use this characters 	
it would not work without the <pre></pre> tags
Solution 4 - Html
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.
" "
This is not recommended for repeated/extensive use within a page. A div margin/padding approach would appear much cleaner.
Solution 5 - Html
I use <span style="display: inline-block; width: 2ch;">	</span> for a two characters wide tab.
Solution 6 - Html
Tab is [HT], or character number 9, in the unicode library.
Solution 7 - Html
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 ...
<div style="padding-left:4.00em;">Indenented text </div>
Or as a regular class in a style sheet
.tabbed {padding-left:4.00em;}
Then the HTML might look like
<p>regular paragraph regular paragraph regular paragraph</p>
<p class="tabbed">Indented text Indented text Indented text</p>
<p>regular paragraph regular paragraph regular paragraph</p>