Newline and tab characters

I've just noticed that "\r\n" and "\t" characters create a space when rendered in the browser (tested in IE and Firefox). I'd always thought the browser would ignore these characters. This wouldn't normally be a problem but the wysiwyg html editor in the cms I'm using tries to be friendly by formatting the html code, so something like <span style=\"COLOR: #af0e14\">get</span><span style=\"COLOR: #333333\">online</span> becomes \r\n\t\t<span style=\"COLOR: #af0e14\">get</span>\r\n\t\t<span style=\"COLOR: #333333\">online</span> and instead of being displayed as getonline it's displayed as get online. Is there a simple way to sort this out or do I need to create a function to strip these characters before display, checking first that they don't occur within a <pre> tag in which case I mustn't strip them. TIA Arno