How to replace custom tabs with spaces in a string, depend on the size of the tab?

python whitespace spaces tabstop
Austin picture Austin · Apr 17, 2013 · Viewed 20.6k times · Source

I'm trying to write a python function not using any modules that will take a string that has tabs and replace the tabs with spaces appropriate for an inputted tabstop size. It can't just replace all size-n tabs by n spaces though, since a tab could be 1 to n spaces. I'm really confused, so if anyone could just point me in the right direction I'd greatly appreciate it.

For instance, if tabstop is size 4 originally:

123\t123 = 123 123 #one space in between

but changed to tabstop 5:

123\t123 = 123  123 #two spaces in between

I think I need to pad the end of the string with spaces until string%n==0 and then chunk it, but I'm pretty lost at the moment..

Answer

Joel Cornett picture Joel Cornett · Apr 17, 2013

For a tab length of 5:

>>> s = "123\t123"
>>> print ''.join('%-5s' % item for item in s.split('\t'))
123  123  
>>>

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