How to detect a tab in a text file?

Question

Is detecting tabs same as detecting the spaces? i.e. for detecting a space, I would just compare the space character with its ascii number.

For a tab do I have to search for '\t' character in the file or there is some other way?

Answer 1

if('\t' == myChar)

This would work, and would be better than checking against 9 since 9 may not be a guaranteed value across all architectures.

Answer 2

Assuming you are working with ASCII data, you can just search for a byte with value '\t' (9) in the text file. Tabs are represented as a single byte in text files and most libraries for reading files don't do anything special with those bytes.