I recently ran into the same problem but the issue wasn't related to tabs and spaces but an odd Unicode character that appeared invisible to the eye in my IDE. Eventually, I isolated the problem and typed out the line exactly as it was and checked the git diff:
If you are able to isolate the line before the reported line and type it out again, you might find that it solves your problem. Won't tell you why it happened in the first place, but it at least gets rid of the issue.
