The width of Tab (\t) character in silverlight TextBox is not equal to 4 spaces or 8 spaces. It's too short. Is it possible to change the width of the TAB (\t) character displayed in a silverlight TextBox?
Note that I want to avoid replacing TABs with spaces. Any ideas on how to do this?
Silverlight does not allow you to change the tab character length in a TextBox.
If your reading in a string (from a file or something) and setting the Text to it then if you look at your Text Property you'll see the escaped tab (\t). Searching for a \t is easy
TabTextBox.Text = TabTextBox.Text.Replace("\t", " ");
So this will replace all tabs with 4 spaces.
Besides pressing tab in a TextBox will not tab the text. It will focus to the next UIElement within the parent UIElement.
Or maybe on tab key press event, append the string literal to the text box. Similar to what MyK is suggesting.
If you're trying to get this to display, write a converter. the syntax is around--just grab an example, gut it, rename to something like 'tabstoptexttospacedtextconverter', add a reference to your local controls in app.xaml, then create an instance of it and give it an x:name to use it. Bind the data for your text box and assign it your new converter.
It'll be a little bit of hassle because you'll have to determine the appropriate width of the final display TB, and then probably use a converterparameter to make that work. But long story short, split on \t, then foreach(string str in splitSourceText) do something like this:
for (int i = 0; i < (str.Length % 8 > 0 ? str.Length % 8 : 8); i++) str+= " ";
You can limit the characters on the split string arrays with the parameter or split on \r\n first.
