Cant copy a tab character from terminal

Question

I'm writing a small program that prints to the terminal its output in tab separated format. But whenever I select the text with tabs and copy it, the tabs are replaces with some number of spaces.

What can I do to make terminal not replace tabs with spaces when trying to copy?

Answer 1

On macOS Sierra (maybe also in earlier versions), you can do:

Edit -> Copy Special -> Copy Plain Text

Or using the shortcut: alt+shift+⌘ cmd+C

Answer 2

Your best bet may be to substitute "\t" in place of tabs in your output, and do a search and replace after you copy and paste it to the destination. You could use any character or string as the substitute, of course, but using "\t" makes it easy to restore the tabs using echo -e if pasting to a command-line environment. The substitution can be done using: |sed 's/\\/\\\\\\/g;s/\t/\\t/g'