Handling the TAB character in Java

I'm going through a configuration file with a RandomAccessFile reader. I have a configuration option which is one (1) tab away from the start of the line. When my reader gets this line, would I be able to just tell it to skip one character and then start reading, or does the tab character开发者_运维问答 not work that way?

Example:

This is a line
        This line has a tab

Let's say I've loaded the second line into my reader. If I'm playing with that String and I do currentLine = currentLine.subString(1);

Would that give me:

currentLine = "This line has a tab";

Thanks for your help.

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Yes the tab character is one character. You can match it in java with "\t".

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You can also use the tab character '\t' to represent a tab, instead of "\t".

char c ='\t'; // tabulator
char c =(char)9; // tabulator

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Or you could just perform a trim() on the string to handle the case when people use spaces instead of tabs (unless you are reading makefiles)