How many spaces for tab character(\t)?

Question

I want to implement a text drawing function. But I am not sure how \\t works, which means I don\'t know how many spaces I should print for \\t.

Answer 1

A tab character should advance to the next tab stop. Historically tab stops were every 8th character, although smaller values are in common use today and most editors can be configured.

I would expect your output to look like the following:

123456789
a       b
        c

The algorithm is to start a column count at zero, then increment it for each character output. When you get to a tab, output n-(c%n) spaces where c is the column number (zero based) and n is the tab spacing.