Tab not displayed properly

[woile]

Hi guys, I'm trying to add a tab \t to the prompt but it doesn't seem to work. I might be missing something here, is there a way to solve this?

In [3]: prompt('foo\t\tbar')
foo^I^Ibar

I've also tried the unicode representation:

In [13]: prompt('foo\u0009bar')
foo^Ibar

On the other hand \n works fine

In [11]: prompt('foo\nbar')
foo
bar

Sorry if it's something silly, I've been searching in google and reading the docs and I cannot find anything.

Thanks a lot!

[jonathanslenders]

Hi @woile,

Excuse me for the late reply. I just got married, and I've been offline for a while.

This is not really supported yet. For the input itself, it works, because the TabsProcessor is handling that:
https://github.com/jonathanslenders/python-prompt-toolkit/blob/master/prompt_toolkit/layout/processors.py#L489
For the prompt, there is no such thing (yet). Right now, it's best to calculate the amount of spaces and replace the tabs in the prompt. I hope that works.

[woile]

Congratulations @jonathanslenders !

I'll try calculating tabs, let's see if it's possible.
Regards!

[jonathanslenders]

Closing this, assuming it's possible by replacing the tabs with spaces. Let me know if that doesn't work.

[asmeurer]

Worth noting that correctly replacing a tab with spaces isn't entirely trivial. Maybe there's a clever regex that can do it. It also wouldn't be the same when the text is copied from the terminal.

The ^I comes from the char mapping in screen.py. If you comment it out, tabs can be inserted into the prompt, but breaks everything because prompt_toolkit doesn't know to calculate the width of the tab character correctly.

(just my observations, I personally don't care if prompt-toolkit can handle literal tab characters or not)