Tabs as Characters

[jrahhali]

I was looking over a program this morning, and I noticed a tab '\t' was assigned to a char variable and it got me thinking. How can a tab be a character when it consistis of many 'spaces' which are characters?

[sean]

Tab is not really a "character" as much as it is a command for formatting. You'll notice that tabs are set to all different sizes depending on what program is processing the text file. The "tab" is represented as a character, because this and many other formatting commands are represented in text files as ASCII numbers. A "char" in C++ is a variable that can hold any of these numbers and thus their corresponding symbol. IT can hold the alphabet, upper or lower case, the numbers, common symbols, and of course, formatting commands. I can't think of a better way to send the format commands.

[major_small]

a tab isn't really many spaces... a tab is a tab... many spaces can sometimes be considered equivalent, but in reality it's not. a tab is a blank amount of space used for formatting. unless your text editor converts tabs to spaces, when you send a \b (backspace), it should delete the tab, not 1/5 (or however many spaces) of it. also, it reacts differently. tabs are usually set (sometimes at every half-inch), and sometimes padded on the left so that your output would look like this:

hello    123456
hi       123456

whereas spaces would look like this:

hello    123456
hi    123456

here is a useful list of escape sequences, most of which you'll likely use at one time or another.

[jrahhali]

Oooook.
Alright major_small, i got it now, it all makes sense. Very good job at explaning it too. Cheers

[major_small]

Oooook.
Alright major_small, i got it now, it all makes sense. Very good job at explaning it too. Cheers

really? I looked back at that and realized how bad it really came out...