Use the free Tabs to Spaces Converter below: your data never leaves your browser — all work happens on your device, and nothing is uploaded to any server.
Why tabs and spaces cause trouble
Tabs and spaces both create indentation, but they are not the same thing, and mixing them causes real problems. A tab is a single character that moves to the next tab stop, so its width depends on the viewer: it can look like two spaces in one editor and eight in another. Spaces are always exactly as wide as they look. That difference breaks code alignment, ruins pasted tables, and makes the same file look different on every machine that opens it.
Many teams and tools have settled on spaces for exactly this reason, and many style guides demand them. The trouble is that text does not always arrive in the format you need: a colleague’s file uses tabs, a copied snippet carries tabs, or an old document predates the convention. Converting by hand means re-indenting every line, which is slow and invites mistakes in nested code.
How this tool works
Paste your text and choose how many spaces each tab becomes: two, three, four or eight, covering the common conventions. By default every tab in the text is converted, which is right for data and prose where tabs act as separators. If you only want to fix indentation, switch on the leading-tabs option, which converts tabs at the start of lines and leaves tabs inside lines alone, preserving column separators in data.
There is also a column-aware mode. A real tab does not always equal a fixed number of spaces: it jumps to the next multiple of the tab width, so a tab after two characters adds two spaces to reach four, while a tab after three characters adds one. Turn on tab-stop alignment and the tool reproduces that behaviour, so converted code lines up exactly as it did before. With the option off, each tab becomes the full chosen number of spaces, which is simpler and matches what most converters do.
When to use it
Use it before pasting code into a system that dislikes tabs, before sharing a file with a team that standardises on spaces, and before comparing two versions of a file where tab differences would swamp the real changes. Use it on copied tables and data where tabs were used as separators but the target program expects spaces. Writers and editors use it to normalise pasted text so that indentation behaves the same in every program.
It is also a good pre-step before indenting or wrapping lines, since those operations count characters, and a tab’s width is ambiguous. Convert first, and every later measurement is exact.
What conversion does not do
Conversion changes whitespace, not structure. It does not reformat code, fix logic, or align comments that were aligned by luck rather than by columns. If a file mixes tabs and spaces for indentation, converting the tabs may reveal misalignment that was previously hidden, because the two systems were compensating for each other. That is actually useful: it shows you the real structure, which you can then fix deliberately.
Note also that converting spaces back to tabs is a different operation, and this tool does not do it: tabs carry ambiguity that spaces do not, so a round trip is not lossless in general. Convert in the direction your target needs, and keep the original if you may need it again.
Tips for consistent indentation
Pick one width and stick to it across a project: four spaces is the most common default, two is popular for web code, eight matches the classic terminal tab stop. After converting, check a deeply nested section to confirm the alignment looks right, especially if you used the simple fixed-width mode on code that relied on tab stops. Everything runs in your browser, so source code and private documents never leave your device.
Related tools
- Convertidor de Tabulaciones a Espacios (Spanish version)
- Add Prefix and Suffix to Lines
- Wrap Text at Width
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