Unindentation in triple-quoted strings affects explicitly written tabs (\t)

[mbauman]

This caught me by surprise. Explicitly written whitespace escape characters in triple-quoted strings are treated no differently than the actual leading whitespace. Given its implementation as a macro, I can see why this is currently unavoidable, but it is very surprising:

julia> """\t""" == "\t"
true

julia> """
       \t""" == "\t"
false

julia> """
       foo
       \tbar""" == "foo\n\t\bar"
false

julia> """
       foo
       \tbar""" == "foo\n" * " "^8 * "bar"
true

julia> """
       foo
       bar\t""" == "foo\nbar\t"
true

Or a real example — I had to protect the tab within an interpolation.

[JeffBezanson]

Wow. Interestingly:

julia> """
       a
        b
       """
"a\n b\n"

It looks like this case behaves as you'd expect: common leading whitespace is stripped, but the extra space before the b survives. But writing a tab instead of a space:

julia> """
       a
       \tb
       """
"a\n        b\n"

gives 8 spaces instead of the tab character. Doesn't seem right.

[StefanKarpinski]

Well, that's certainly a bug.