I need to preserve tab characters from a textarea through POST Data. It seems that there's no way to differentiate tabs from spaces in the $_POST array, and this is really frustrating me.

I'm using a jQuery plugin from here to allow for tab and shift+tab usage within a textarea. http://teddevito.com/demos/textarea.html

The JavaScript is using this as its TAB character:

$.fn.tabby.defaults = {tabString : String.fromCharCode(9)};

For some reason, it shows an individual space instead of each tab character, so all my code formatting is lost:

<textarea name="field0" rows="26" cols="123"><?php
    echo $_POST['field0'];
?></textarea>

Neither does this. Apparently the tabs disappear before the data even reaches the str_replace function (the four spaces in the first double quotes is when I press TAB in my text editor).

<textarea name="field0" rows="26" cols="123"><?php
    echo str_replace("    ", "\t", $_POST['field0']);
?></textarea>

The reason I need tabs and not multiple spaces is because my application features and on-line code editor.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm guessing the solution would involve modifying the data with javascript before it's sent through POST, but I haven't the slightest idea how to start.