Echo tab characters in bash script

Question

How do I echo one or more tab characters using a bash script? When I run this code

res=\'       \'x # res = \"\\t\\tx\"
echo \'[\'$res\']\' # expect [\\t\\tx         


        

Answer 1

From the bash man page:

Words of the form $'string' are treated specially. The word expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard.

So you can do this:

echo $'hello\tworld'