I looked around for a while but couldn't find the answer to this question. I was showing my mom (a brilliant woman with a PhD who is scared of programming) a script I was writing. I was explaing to her how I could match and replace with regexes and such, and showed her an output like this: 
This is
     sample code
with a 
     tab in it.
this line is preceded by a \n

[download]
So she was sort of catching on, and then she asked me how I can tell by looking at an input sample whether I'm looking at a tab character or whitespace or what. I sort of dodged the question by saying that the computer knows what is what, but the fact is I didn't know. So now my question to the monks:
Is there any editor/emacs mode/etc such that I can view an input or output sample that actually shows, say, \t instead of actually tabbing. Does that explanation make sense? I mean, I'd like to be able to look at a paragraph or whatever without having to resort to octal or something but still be able to see what's what in terms of metachars and such. Is there an easy way to do this? If this has already been addressed somewhere, please point the way and accept my apology. Thanks Monks!

In reply to Viewing metasymbols in output? by tshabet

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