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

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    I find it helpfull to use <PRE> when using tab mulple time in the begining of the line (for instence when qouting C code) Commented Oct 2, 2013 at 12:36
  • A TAB character... to do what? Commented Nov 5, 2015 at 14:10
  • you can define your own tag <tab>, then use jQuery on ready function to replace or pad them with desired number of equivalent spaces. Commented Nov 11, 2015 at 10:43
  • If you really need tabs, give a try to white-space Commented Jun 8, 2016 at 6:58
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    FYI - If a static 4x&nbsp; (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. Commented Mar 5, 2018 at 6:58

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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 &nbsp; such as &thinsp;, &ensp;,and &emsp;.

In ASCII, &#09; is a tab.

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

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3 Comments

What difference is between &ensp; and &emsp;? I tested, both of them have exactly the same space ..!
The secret sauce to making &#09; show up as a tabbed space in HTML is the white-space CSS definition. <p style="display:inline-block;white-space:pre-wrap;">&#09;¡Muy bien! Tabbing works for me in Spanish & English </p>. white-space:pre; also works. You could also use a "tab" tag <tab/> along with the CSS ::before Selector tab::before {content:"\0009";} but it doesn't show up as a tab when highlighting, cutting and pasting.
@Shafizadeh From W3 specs: an en space is half the point size and an em space is equal to the point size of the current font. &emsp; is slightly bigger. I can see the difference in Chrome 64 and FireFox 58.
627

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

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15 Comments

@Alohci IMHO padding with CSS is not that good since when you will zoom the text in the browser the text size will increase but not the padding AFAIK.
@AlexV - If you uses em as the dimension, as I did, it should expand with the text size. Even if you don't, it will depend on the nature of the zoom mechanism used.
@Eoin - indeed. I.e. what you really want in those cases are tab stops. But that wasn't what the OP was asking about. The OP was asking for a replacement for multiple sequential non-breaking spaces, which wouldn't line the rows up either. CSS has a tab-size property which is what you really want, but its browser support has been erratic. Failing that, table-layout or maybe flexbox are your best bets.
This is not the correct response. You don't answer if there is a tab-character or not!
this doesn't answer the question. the answer below by kristian addresses the issue user posted about
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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.

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204

&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; &thinsp;, &ensp; and the aforementioned &emsp;.

It's also worth mentioning that in ASCII and Unicode, &#09; is a horizontal tabulation.

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5 Comments

This is not a valid XHTML according to W3 validator
That's only half true, since &emsp; is true valid W3C mark-up. But you are clearly referring to the favourable CSS example. In this case, we are utilising custom tags, which are new mark-up and not part of the W3C set. The W3C validator is strict to the degree of always flagging custom tags as errors. It's up to you which is more important. It's about time we got a decent official implimentation of tabs added to the Html mark-up set. Hope this helps.
I used this in a case for Swing JTable headers with a String value and an HTML arrow-type character, where I needed this character as a separator. Works great! Thanks!
"Oddly, there are no horizontal tab in html" Not all that odd as formatting has been consistently been moving away from html and into css, and a tab is not a visual element only a formatting element, but good answer and well explained
@Buksy The question is not tagged with XHTML so it doesn't matter that it's not valid XHTML.
130

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

  1. Type &nbsp; to add a single space.
  2. Type &ensp; to add 2 spaces.
  3. Type &emsp; to add 4 spaces.
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4 Comments

Just add ; to them too. Like &nbsp;
@Mani The question was asked in 2009 and the accepted answer is from 2009. This answer was added in 2018.. When you look at it that way, it's not stupid.
@ᴛʜᴇᴘᴀᴛᴇʟ Forget if this actually answers the question or not but the marked one doesn't accurately answer is the point I am trying to make.
I believe &emsp is a breaking white space character, whereas &nbsp is a non-breaking white space character, correct? So these would only be equivalent as far as visual space is concerned, but not regarding line breaking.
71

Try &emsp;

It is equivalent to four &nbsp;s.

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2 Comments

In fact is not the correct answer as w3.org/MarkUp/html3/specialchars.html . clearly says it depends on the type of font being used, also em space is equal to the point size of the current font, and the em space as being equivalent to two space characters
I believe &emsp is a breaking white space character, whereas &nbsp is a non-breaking white space character, correct? So these would only be equivalent as far as visual space is concerned, but not regarding line breaking.
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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 &nbsp; 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.

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1 Comment

HTML wasn't designed from the beginning to be customly styled.
49

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

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44

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 &nbsp; or &emsp; that you'd need.

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3 Comments

This will add 80px to the left and 80px to the right of the span tag, not exactly a tab.
Still a clever response as you're only adding a short bit of markup while allowing CSS to do the styling.
I agree with @mcont and would change it to padding: 0 0 0 80px were a left tab of 80 pixels desired. However, mixing pixels and ems and ens is a bad practice.
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&emsp;, &ensp;, &#8195; or &#8194; can be used.

W3 says...

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.

Read More at W3.org for HTML3

Read More at W3.org for HTML4

Even more at Wikipedia

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18

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.

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11

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; }
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1 Comment

Yeah. That'll work too. Just remember to put it on :first-letter if the point is to indent only the first sentence.
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If whitespace becomes that important, it may be better to use preformatted text and the <pre> tag.

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3 Comments

The OP isn't being so particular about whitespace, just asked about shortcuts for multiple &nbsp;'s. Invoking the <pre> tag will create a lot of extra work.
To avoid the monospace font, use css "white-space:pre-wrap"
Whitespace isn't a that important thing. It's a fact of life.
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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.

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7

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>
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7

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

<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
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7

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 &nbsp; 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);
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7

There is a simple css for it:

white-space: pre;

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

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6

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.

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5

Instead of writing &nbsp; four time for space equal to tab, you can write &emsp; once.

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4 
<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.

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3

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
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3

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.
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3

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;}
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2

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.

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1 Comment

(x)HTML should specify the content of the document, how it is displayed should be handled by CSS. There are reasons that laying out webpages using tables should never be used for non-tabular data.
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If you want the TABs

  • work like tabulators, even in contenteditables
  • don't want to use the ugly "pre" fonts

then use instead of nbsp's:

<pre class='TAB'>&#009;</pre>

Place this in your CSS:

.TAB { margin:0; padding:0; display:inline; tab-size: 8; }

Change the tab-size to your needs.

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1

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

  1. 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.
  2. Use a static variable (integer) within the self-recursive function to track the recursion.
  3. 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 &nbsp; or <pre> tags, or other characters, as appropriate.

From testing the horizontal tab character, &#09; I found that it doesn't work as a replacement to multiple &nbsp; in the scenario I described. You may have different results.

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1

Only "pre" tag:

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

You can apply any CSS class on this tag.

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1

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>
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<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.

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