How to print a tab in Python

If you want to print a tab in Python, you need to use the \t escape sequence in your string.

This tutorial shows how you can print tabs in Python for different situations.

Print tabs in a Python string

To print a tab in a Python string, you need to add the \t escape sequence in the middle of each word in your string.

Here are some examples:

print("Hello\tWorld")
print("Python\tis\tawesome!")
print("1\t2\t3\t4")

Output:

Hello   World
Python  is      awesome!
1       2       3       4

You don’t need to add any white spaces between the words you want to separate using a tab.

When you have a list data, you can use the \t and print function to insert a tab between the list elements.

See the example below:

p_list = [1, 2, 3]

print(str(p_list[0]) + "\t" + str(p_list[1]) + "\t" + str(p_list[2]))

Alternatively, you can use a for loop to print a list in one line.

You need to add the sep (separator) and end arguments to your print function as follows:

p_list = [1, 2, 3]

for item in p_list:
    print(str(item)+"\t", sep=" ,", end="")

The output will be:

1       2       3

When you code a formatted Python string, you can include the \t character inside the string:

print(f"1\t2\t3")

Output:

1       2       3

But keep in mind that you can’t include a backslash in an f-string expression.

If you try to add a tab between two variables as follows:

name = "Nathan"
age = 29

print(f"{name + '\t' + str(age)}")

Python will show an error:

File ...
    print(f"{name + '\t' + str(age)}")
                                ^
SyntaxError: f-string expression part cannot include a backslash

To fix this error, you need to separate the expressions and keep the \t character outside of the curly brackets.

Here’s one way to fix it:

print(f"{name}\t{str(age)}")

# Output:
# Nathan  29

Sometimes, people also fix this error by putting the \t character in a variable.

If you put the tab character in a variable, you can use it in the f-string expression part like this:

name = "Nathan"
age = 29
tab = '\t'

print(f"{name + tab + str(age)}")  # ✅

Personally, I prefer to put the \t escape sequence outside of the expression, but feel free to use a variable if you want to.

And that’s how you print a tab in Python. Easy peasy! 👍