Pylint treats tabs like spaces

[sillypantscoder]

Bug description

I use spaces instead of tabs. Pylint treats spaces as identical to tabs, and frequently reports that I am using one space, which is not a normal number.

Command used

pylint file.py

Pylint output

************* Module baseHTTP2
file.py:9:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:10:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:11:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:12:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:15:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:16:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:17:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:18:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:21:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:22:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:23:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:26:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:27:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:28:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)
file.py:31:0: W0311: Bad indentation. Found 1 spaces, expected 4 (bad-indentation)

...etc...

Expected behavior

I would expect all the "Bad indentation." notices to be gone.

Pylint version

pylint 2.7.4
astroid 2.5.6
Python 3.9.6 (default, Jun 28 2021, 08:57:49) 
[GCC 10.3.0]

OS / Environment

Pylint on VS Code for Linux. Also on Replit.

[Pierre-Sassoulas]

Do you mind upgrading pylint to see if the problem still exists in later version ? pylint 2.7.4 is very old, I initially thought we dropped bad-indentation, (like we dropped bad-continuation and bad-whitespace in pylint 2.6), but it's not the case.

[rogersheu]

@Pierre-Sassoulas

Not sure if this fully addresses the original issue, but I tried changing my VSCode "Indent Using Spaces" setting to be from 4 to 1 for a file.

When I did that and ran pylint with no other changes, I got the bad-indentation the original issue brings up.

If I provide the following .pylintrc config, the message goes away.

[MASTER]
indent-string=" "

I have tested this on 3.3.0-dev0 and have not tested this on 2.7.4 (or older).

[Pierre-Sassoulas]

Thank you for the investigation @rogersheu. I wonder if using '\t' for the indent-string option on actual tab for indentation would fix the issue.