html - How to get a tab character?

Question

In HTML, there is no character for a tab, but I am confused as to why I can copy and paste one here: . (You can't see the full width of it, but if you click to edit my question, you will see the character.) If I can copy and paste a tab character, there should be a unicode equivalent that can be coded into html. I know it doesn't exist, but this is a mystery I've never been able to grasp.

So my question is: why is there not a unicode character for a tab even if I can copy and paste it?

Answer 1

Sure there's an entity for tabs:

	

(The tab is ASCII character 9, or Unicode U+0009.)

However, just like literal tabs (ones you type in to your text editor), all tab characters are treated as whitespace by HTML parsers and collapsed into a single space except those within a <pre> block, where literal tabs will be rendered as 8 spaces in a monospace font.