I have to render some text to a web page. The text is coming from sources outside my control and it is formatted using newlines and tab characters. New lines <code>(\n)</code> can be replaced by <code>br</code> tags, but what about preserving tabs? A brief search reveals there is no way to directly render tab characters in HTML.

replace <code>\t</code> with <code>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</code>. Each space you want will be a <code>&nbsp;</code> As pointed out this isn't completely correct as it only pretends to be a tab as HTML doesn't actually output format a tab as you would expect.