Tab space instead of multiple non-breaking spaces (“nbsp”)?

1005

votes

Is it possible to insert a tab character in HTML instead of having to type   four times?

html

I find it helpfull to use <PRE> when using tab mulple time in the begining of the line (for instence when qouting C code) – Guy Kovel

A TAB character... to do what? – Michel de Ruiter

you can define your own tag <tab>, then use jQuery on ready function to replace or pad them with desired number of equivalent spaces. – Khaled.K

If you really need tabs, give a try to white-space – Buksy

FYI - If a static 4x  (or a single &emsp;) is not cutting it and you want them to line up to the next "4 spaced" column, as a tab might do, (which would mean sometimes its actually 0 or 1 or 2 or 3 spaces to line up)..like for instance.. in say, some text editors.. Unfortunately, You can't in HTML... without <table>s... and also, using some amount of spaces to try to hack it... will require a fixed font.... I think most of the issues lie between the need for a fixed font and that HTML loves to remove white space. – Pimp Trizkit

614

votes

It's much cleaner to use CSS. Try padding-left:5em or margin-left:5em as appropriate instead.

1300

votes

It depends on which character set you want to use.

There's no tab entity defined in ISO-8859-1 HTML - but there are a couple of whitespace characters other than   such as  , &ensp;,and &emsp;.

In ASCII, 	 is a tab.

Here is a complete listing of HTML entities and a useful discussion of whitespace on Wikipedia.

252

votes

No, Tab is just whitespace as far as HTML is concerned. I'd recommend an em-space instead which is this big (→| |←) ...typically 4 spaces wide — and is input as &emsp;.

You might even be able to get away with using the Unicode character (" ") for it, if you're lucky.

Here is a list of Space characters and “zero-width spaces” in Unicode.

202

votes

&emsp; is the answer.

However, they won't be as functional as you might expect if you are used to using horizontal tabulations in word-processors e.g. Word, Wordperfect, Open Office, Wordworth, etc. They are fixed width, and they cannot be customised.

CSS gives you far greater control and provides an alternative until the W3C provide an official solution.

Example:

padding-left:4em

..or..

margin-left:4em

..as appropriate

It depends on which character set you want to use.

You could set up some tab tags and use them similar to how you would use h tags.

<style>
    tab1 { padding-left: 4em; }
    tab2 { padding-left: 8em; }
    tab3 { padding-left: 12em; }
    tab4 { padding-left: 16em; }
    tab5 { padding-left: 20em; }
    tab6 { padding-left: 24em; }
    tab7 { padding-left: 28em; }
    tab8 { padding-left: 32em; }
    tab9 { padding-left: 36em; }
    tab10 { padding-left: 40em; }
    tab11 { padding-left: 44em; }
    tab12 { padding-left: 48em; }
    tab13 { padding-left: 52em; }
    tab14 { padding-left: 56em; }
    tab15 { padding-left: 60em; }
    tab16 { padding-left: 64em; }
</style>

...and use them like so:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
        <title>Tabulation example</title>

        <style type="text/css">
            dummydeclaration { padding-left: 4em; } /* Firefox ignores first declaration for some reason */
            tab1 { padding-left: 4em; }
            tab2 { padding-left: 8em; }
            tab3 { padding-left: 12em; }
            tab4 { padding-left: 16em; }
            tab5 { padding-left: 20em; }
            tab6 { padding-left: 24em; }
            tab7 { padding-left: 28em; }
            tab8 { padding-left: 32em; }
            tab9 { padding-left: 36em; }
            tab10 { padding-left: 40em; }
            tab11 { padding-left: 44em; }
            tab12 { padding-left: 48em; }
            tab13 { padding-left: 52em; }
            tab14 { padding-left: 56em; }
            tab15 { padding-left: 60em; }
            tab16 { padding-left: 64em; }

        </style>

    </head>

    <body>
        <p>Non tabulated text</p>

        <p><tab1>Tabulated text</tab1></p>
        <p><tab2>Tabulated text</tab2></p>
        <p><tab3>Tabulated text</tab3></p>
        <p><tab3>Tabulated text</tab3></p>
        <p><tab2>Tabulated text</tab2></p>
        <p><tab3>Tabulated text</tab3></p>
        <p><tab4>Tabulated text</tab4></p>
        <p><tab4>Tabulated text</tab4></p>
        <p>Non tabulated text</p>
        <p><tab3>Tabulated text</tab3></p>
        <p><tab4>Tabulated text</tab4></p>
        <p><tab4>Tabulated text</tab4></p>
        <p><tab1>Tabulated text</tab1></p>
        <p><tab2>Tabulated text</tab2></p>

    </body>

</html>

Run the snippet above to see a visual example.

Extra discussion

There are no horizontal tabulation entities defined in ISO-8859-1 HTML, however there are some other white-space characters available than the usual &nbsp, for example;  , &ensp; and the aforementioned &emsp;.

It's also worth mentioning that in ASCII and Unicode, 	 is a horizontal tabulation.

107

votes

Below are the 3 different ways provided by HTML to insert empty space

Type   to add a single space.
Type &ensp; to add 2 spaces.
Type &emsp; to add 4 spaces.

69

votes

Try &emsp;

It is equivalent to four  s.

54

votes

There really isn't any easy way to insert multiple spaces inside (or in the middle) of a paragraph. Those suggesting you use CSS are missing the point. You may not always be trying to indent a paragraph from a side but, in fact, trying to put extra spaces in a particular spot of it.

In essence, in this case, the spaces become the content and not the style. I don't know why so many people don't see that. I guess the rigidity with which they try to enforce the separation of style and content rule (HTML was designed to do both from the beginning - there is nothing wrong with occasionally defining style of an unique element using appropriate tags without having to spend a lot more time on creating CSS style sheets and there is absolutely nothing unreadable about it when it's used in moderation. There is also something to be said for being able to do something quickly.) translates to how they can only consider whitespace characters as being used only for style and indentation.

And when there is no graceful way to insert spaces without having to rely on &emsp; and   tags, I would argue that the resulting code becomes far more unreadible than if there was an appropriately named tag that would have allowed you to quickly insert a large number of spaces (or if, you know, spaces weren't needlessly consumed in the first place).

As it is though, as was said above, your best bet would be to use &emsp; to insert in the correct place.

48

votes

It's better to use the pre tag. The pre tag defines preformatted text.

<pre>
 This is
preformatted text.
It preserves      both spaces

and line breaks.

</pre>

know more about pre tag at this link

42

votes

I came across this while searching for a method and ended up figuring out my own that seems to work easily for what's wanted. I'm new to posting here so I hope this works... But have this in CSS:

span.tab{
    padding: 0 80px; /* Or desired space*/
}

Then in your HTML have this be your "long tab" in mid sentence like I needed:

<span class="tab"></span>

Saves from the amount of   or &emsp; that you'd need.

Hope this helps someone, cheers!

19

votes

&emsp;, &ensp;,   or   can be used.

W3 says...

The character entities &ensp; and &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.

Read More at W3.org for HTML4

Even more at Wikipedia

17

votes

AFAIK, the only way is to use

&nbsp;

If you can use CSS then you can use padding or margin. See Box model, and for Internet Explorer, also read Internet Explorer box model bug.

11

votes

If you're looking to just indent the first sentence in a paragraph, you could do that with a small CSS trick:

p:first-letter {
    margin-left: 5em;
}

10

votes

If whitespace becomes that important, it may be better to use preformatted text and the <pre> tag.

10

votes

The <tab> tag never made it into browsers, despite being introduced in HTML3. I've always thought it a real pity because life would be much easier in many circumstances if we had it available to us. But you can easily remedy this to give you a fake <tab> tag. Add the following in the head of your HTML or else (without the style tags) into your CSS:

<style>
    tab { padding-left: 4em; }
</style>

From then on, when you need a tab in your document put <tab> in there. It isn't a true tab because it doesn't align to tab-marks, but it works for most needs, without having to dither around with clumsy character entities or spans. It makes it really easy to check your source, and a cinch to format simple things where you don't want to go to the hassle of tables or other more complex "solutions".

One nice aspect of this solution is that you can do a quick search/replace of a text document to replace all TABs with the <tab> tag.

You might be able to define a bunch of true absolute position TABs, then use the appropriate tab (e.g. <tab2> or <tab5> or whatever) where needed, but I haven't found a way to do that without it indenting subsequent lines.

7

votes

I have used a span with in line styling. I have had to do this as I as processing a string of plain text and need to replace the \t with 4 spaces (appx). I couldn't use   as further on in the process they were being interpreted so that the final mark up had non-content spaces.

HTML:

<span style="padding: 0 40px">&nbsp;</span>

I used it in a php function like this:

$message = preg_replace('/\t/', '<span style="padding: 0 40px">&nbsp;</span>', $message);

7

votes

You can use a table and apply a width attribute to the first <td>.

Code:

<table>
    <tr>
        <td width="100">Content1</td>
        <td>Content2</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Content3</td>
        <td>Content4</td>
    </tr>
</table>

Result

Content1       Content2
Content3       Content4

7

votes

If you needed only one tab, the following worked for me.

<style>
  .tab {
    position: absolute;
    left: 10em;
   }
</style>

with the HTML something like:

<p><b>asdf</b> <span class="tab">99967</span></p>
<p><b>hjkl</b> <span class="tab">88868</span></p>

You can add more "tabs" by adding additional "tab" styles and changing the HTML such as:

<style>
  .tab {
    position: absolute;
    left: 10em;
   }
  .tab1 {
    position: absolute;
    left: 20em;
   }
</style>

with the HTML something like:

<p><b>asdf</b> <span class="tab">99967</span><span class="tab1">hear</span></p>
<p><b>hjkl</b> <span class="tab">88868</span><span class="tab1">here</span></p>

7

votes

There is a simple css for it:

white-space: pre;

It keeps the spaces that you add in the HTML rather than unifying them.

6

votes

If you are using CSS, I would suggest the following:

p:first-letter { text-indent:1em; }

This will indent the first line like in traditional publications.

4

votes

<span style="margin-left:64px"></span>

Consider it like this: one tab is equal to 64 pixels. So this is the space we can give by CSS.

3

votes

Well, if one needs a long whitespace in the beginning of one line only out of the whole paragraph, then this may be a solution:

<span style='display:inline-block;height:1em;width:4em;'>&nbsp;</span>

If that is too much to write or one needs such tabs in many places, then you can do this

<span class='tab'>&nbsp;</span>

Then include this into CSS:

span.tab {display:inline-block;height:1em;width:4em;}

3

votes

we can use style="white-space:pre" like this:

<p>Text<tab style="white-space:pre">        </tab>: value</p>
<p>Text2<tab style="white-space:pre">   </tab>: value2</p>
<p>Text32<tab style="white-space:pre">  </tab>: value32</p>

the blank space inside is filled with tabs, the amount of tabs is depend on the text.

it will looks like this:

Text    : value
Text2   : value2
Text32  : value32

3

votes

The ideal CSS code that should be used should be a combination of "display" and "min-width" properties...

display: inline-block;
min-width: 10em; // ...for example, depending on the uniform width to be achieved for the items [in a list], which is a common scenario where tab is often needed.

2

votes

I use a list with no bullets to give the "tabbed" appearance. (It's what I sometimes do when using MS Word)

In the CSS file:

.tab {
    margin-top: 0px;
    margin-bottom: 0px;
    list-style-type: none;
}

And in the HTML file use unordered lists:

This is normal text
<ul class="tab">
    <li>This is indented text</li>
</ul>

The beauty of this solution is that you can make further indentations using nested lists.

A noob here talking, so if there are any errors, please comment.

1

votes

Using CSS and best practice, the dynamic creation of nested, indented menus would be as follows:

Create a style for each nesting, such as indent1, indent2 etc, with each specifying its own left margin. Site structure should rarely go beyond three levels of nesting.
Use a static variable (integer) within the self-recursive function to track the recursion.
For each loop, append the loop number to the word indent, using server side scripting such as PHP or ASP, so that these menus are formatted appropriately by CSS.

Alternatively, loop through the static variable to add spacing using multiple   or <pre> tags, or other characters, as appropriate.

From testing the horizontal tab character, 	 I found that it doesn't work as a replacement to multiple   in the scenario I described. You may have different results.

1

votes

Only "pre" tag:

<pre>Name:      Waleed Hasees
Age:        33y
Address:    Palestine / Jein</pre>

You can apply any CSS class on this tag.

1

votes

I would simply recommend:

/* In your CSS code: */
pre
{
    display:inline;
}

<!-- And then, in your HTML code: -->

<pre>    This text comes after four spaces.</pre>
<span> Continue the line with other element without braking </span>

1

votes

<head>
<style> t {color:#??????;letter-spacing:35px;} </style>
</head>

<t>.</t>

Make sure the color code matches the background the px is variable to desired length for the tab.

Then add your text after the < t >.< /t >

The period is used as a space holder and it is easier to type, but the '& #160;' can be used in place of the period also making it so the color coding is irrelative.

<head>
<style> t {letter-spacing:35px;} </style>
</head>

<t>&#160;</t>

This is useful mostly for displaying paragraphs of text though may come in useful in other portions of scripts.

1

votes

You can also use:

p::before {
    content: "";
    padding-left: 30px;
}

And replace "p" with any other selector you have in mind.

1

votes

we use custom space span class

<span class='space'></span>

Include space class in CSS.

.space 
{
   margin-left:45px;
}

Tab space instead of multiple non-breaking spaces (“nbsp”)?

30 Answers