How to get a tab character?

In HTML, there is no character for a tab, but I am confused as to why I can copy and paste one here: . (You can't see the full width of it, but if you click to edit my question, you will see the character.) If I can copy and paste a tab character, there should be a unicode equivalent that can be coded into html. I know it doesn't exist, but this is a mystery I've never been able to grasp.

So my question is: why is there not a unicode character for a tab even if I can copy and paste it?

Sure there's an entity for tabs:

	

(The tab is ASCII character 9, or Unicode U+0009.)

However, just like literal tabs (ones you type in to your text editor), all tab characters are treated as whitespace by HTML parsers and collapsed into a single space except those within a <pre> block, where literal tabs will be rendered as 8 spaces in a monospace font.

Try  

as per the docs :

The character entities   and   denote an en space and an em space respectively, where an en space is half the point size and an em space is equal to the point size of the current font. For fixed pitch fonts, the user agent can treat the en space as being equivalent to A space character, and the em space as being equuivalent to two space characters.

Docs link : https://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/specialchars.html

put it in between <pre></pre> tags then use this characters 	

it would not work without the <pre></pre> tags