Why does my tab character convert to a space in cookie?

I'm using the Context.Request.Cookies object to read/write cookies.

I'm simply writing a single line of text that is delimited by tabs ('\t'). Immediately when I read back in the cookie through the Visual Studio 2008 debugger, the cookie object contains the string value, but all the tab characters are converted to spaces.

When I publish to production, it doesn't seem to convert the tabs. What would cause this in VS? Could this be happening on certain machines in production?

From stackoverflow

• Try using URL encoding to see if that preserves the tab.