tabifying

Verb

tabify (third-person singular simple present tabifies, present participle tabifying, simple past and past participle tabified)

1. (transitive) To reformat (text) by converting spaces into tab characters.
   • A common use of this program is to tabify text files which you've loaded in over the phone from a computer system (like UNIX) that tends to turn all tabs into spaces for 300 baud DEC writers.1985, Terry A. Ward, Applied programming techniques in C