In case someone else finds it useful here is a program I wrote a year or so ago to help manage tab characters. It will convert tabs to runs of spaces, convert runs of spaces to tabs, or count or check for tab characters as required. It supports tab stops at regular and irregular positions.
http://codewiki.wikispaces.com/tabs.py It is written in Python and you can either use it from the command line or call the functions from another Python script. Documentation is included on the web page. James -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
