chickadee » tabexpand » tabexpand/stop/col

Yields a new string that is equivalent to string str except that any ASCII tab characters have been expanded to space characters. stop, a positive integer defaulting to 8, is used as the tabstop. col, a nonnegative integer defaulting to 0, is the context starting column for the beginning of the string, with respect to which tabs positions should be calculated. All characters other than tab are treated as if they were normal printable characters with no special effect on the column.