Tab character in a string prints 8 spaces

[hecresper]

Hi,

I'm starting an online Python class and have been using Python 3 latest with IDLE. I open Python first then open IDLE next to it. Well, I got to the section using the newline and tab characters when printing strings. Then noticed something peculiar on the output. IDLE is configured to treat tabs as 4 spaces, but when the print command runs a string with the \t in it, it shows 8 spaces on the output.

print("Line 1\n\tLine 2")

Output comes out like this:

Output:
Line 1
        Line 2

Instead of this:

Output:
Line 1
    Line 2

The first thing I did was check IDLE's tab stop configuration and it was already set to 4 spaces. I changed it to 2 spaces but the output still shows 8 spaces.

Thank you for helping in demystifying this issue.