Python string Method - expandtabs()

The expandtabs() method in Python strings returns a copy of the string with all tab characters (\t) replaced by one or more spaces. By default, each tab character is replaced by eight spaces.

The syntax for the expandtabs() method is as follows:

string.expandtabs(tabsize)

Here, string is the string that we want to expand the tabs in, and tabsize is an optional integer argument that specifies the number of spaces to replace each tab character with (default is 8).

Example:

# Defining a string with tab characters
my_string = "hello\tworld"

# Using the expandtabs() method
result = my_string.expandtabs()

print(result)   # Output: 'hello   world'

In the above example, the expandtabs() method is used to replace the tab character (\t) in the string my_string with spaces. The resulting string is then assigned to the variable result, which is printed using the print() function. By default, each tab character is replaced with eight spaces, so the output shows the string 'hello world', with three spaces between 'hello' and 'world'. If we wanted to replace the tab characters with a different number of spaces, we could pass an integer argument to the expandtabs() method, like this:

# Using the expandtabs() method with a tabsize of 4
result = my_string.expandtabs(4)

print(result)   # Output: 'hello   world'

In this example, the tab characters are replaced with four spaces instead of eight, resulting in the same output as before ('hello world').