Is it “bad practice” to use tab characters in string literals?

Question

As a follow-up on Is it mandatory to escape tabulator characters in C and C++? (do note I\'m not the author of said question).

I\'ve learned such code is considered

Answer 1

I've never really thought about it, but I can't imagine finding literal tabspace characters a good idea because you cannot immediately distinguish them from standard whitespace. If you need a tabspace in your string literal for some specific reason, it's more clear and explicit to write \t so that everybody knows precisely what you intended to do.

By the way, the notion that there must be a good use case just because the standard allows it … is somewhat broken. For example, the standard allows us to declare raw pointers, and to write new.