castorp
Member
Hi,
when a tab is placed at a position that is not a multiple of the tab-width, "Convert tabs to spaces" does not work.
e.g. a line with 3 spaces, one tab character followed by a regular character (0x20 0x20 0x20 0x09 0x65)
When the tab size in PNotepad is set to 4, convert tabs to spaces does not replace the tab character (it does nothing)
simon
PN Developer
The problem with this is finding an algorithm that makes everyone happy. Initially all tabs were converted to spaces and vice versa. There were a lot of complaints about this.
People told me that they expected only tabbed indentation to be changed, because tabs elsewhere in the file could be important.
Now you're correct in that three spaces and a tab character is the equivalent of four spaces (with tab stops at 4) but the whole algorithm will need replacing for this, because it will no longer be possible to do this as a simple regular expression replacement.
Have you filed an issue on google code for this?
castorp
Member
Simon,
thanks for the answer.
No I haven't filed an issue so far, mainly because it could have been that the behaviour was intended.
I have logged this as
http://code.google.com/p/pnotepad/issues/detail?id=973
BrewmanNH
Member
My take on this issue would be that if you're converting tabs to spaces, and tab stops are set at 4 spaces, then every tab should give you 4 spaces. Your scenario would end up at 3 spaces, another 4 for the tab's 4 spaces, giving a total of 7 spaces. I think that the programming required to find that the tab is only one space would be more work than it's worth, but I'm not a very knowledgable programmer so I am not sure how difficult it would be for sure. But, it does seem like a lot of work that could be better utilized in creating something more useful, such as a scheme file editor. :)
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