Tabs to Spaces
Convert tab indentation to spaces — replaces every tab with 4 spaces instantly for consistent code style. Free, client-side untabify converter.
🔒 100% Client-Side Processing
Your data is processed entirely in your browser and never transmitted to any server.
0 / 100M Limit
Common Use Cases
Fixing Python indentation errors
Convert tab-indented code to spaces to satisfy PEP 8 and eliminate the mixed-indentation TabError.
Making diffs render consistently
Untabify code so alignment looks identical in review tools, terminals, and editors regardless of tab-width settings.
Preparing YAML content
YAML forbids tabs in indentation — convert pasted content before it breaks parsing.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How many spaces replace each tab?
- Each tab character becomes exactly 4 spaces. This "untabify" step makes indentation render identically in every editor, terminal, and diff view regardless of tab-width settings.
- Why do style guides prefer spaces?
- Consistency: spaces render the same width everywhere, keeping alignment intact in code review tools and terminals. Python's PEP 8 mandates 4-space indentation, and mixed tabs-and-spaces is a syntax error in Python 3.
- Will this change tabs inside my strings and comments?
- Yes. The replacement is textual and has no understanding of syntax, so a tab inside a string literal, a comment or a here-doc is expanded exactly like an indentation tab. For source files where that matters, use your editor's or formatter's conversion, which parses the language first.
- Does it affect tabs in the middle of a line?
- It does — every tab becomes four spaces, wherever it appears. That matters for tab-separated data, where converting alignment tabs will silently destroy the column structure. Convert indentation in code, not delimiters in data.
- How do I convert back to tabs?
- The Spaces to Tabs tool reverses it, collapsing each run of four spaces into a single tab. The round trip is only lossless if the file used exactly four-space indentation to begin with; two- or three-space indentation will not survive it.
- Is my data private when I use this tool?
- Yes. This tool runs entirely in your browser using client-side JavaScript — nothing you type is transmitted to, logged by, or stored on any server. You can safely process confidential text, tokens, or code.