horizontal tabulation


horizontal tabulation

(character)(tab, Control-I, HT, ASCII 9) A character whichwhen displayed or printed causes the following character to beplaced at the next "tabstop" - the column whose number is amultiple of the current tab width. Commonly (especially inUnix(?)) the tab width is eight, so, counting from the leftmargin (column zero), the tab stops are at columns 8, 16, 24,up to the width of the screen or page.

A tab width of four or two is often preferred when indentingprogram source code to conserve indentation.

Represented as "\\t" in C, Unix, and derivatives.