How to find out how many spaces or tabs before the beginning of letters/characters in a string?

Question

PHP

that is, the lines "\t\t\tText blah blah"
how to find out what exactly 3 tabs are at the beginning of this line?

Answer 1

Cut out the regular expression and count.
^\t+

Answer 2

Look towards substr_count(), which will return the number of occurrences of a substring in a string. And there you will calculate the sum of tabs + spaces or whatever else you need.