How to replace custom tabs with spaces in a string, depend on the size of the tab?

Question

I\'m trying to write a python function not using any modules that will take a string that has tabs and replace the tabs with spaces appropriate for an inputted tabstop size.

Answer 1

Sorry, i misread the question the first time.

This is a recursive version that should work for any number of tabs in the input :

def tabstop ( s , tabnum = 4):
    if not '\t' in s:
        return s
    l = s.find('\t')
    return s[0:l]+' '*(tabnum-l)+tabstop(s[l+1:],tabnum)