Remove tabs with more than 5 in a line - c++

Question

I am trying to extract a snippet out of a sourcecode from a website and now I want to delete all the spaces and tabs before the tags in each line. So I copied the string to a char and now I am checking each character with isspace (also tried '\t' and ' ') each line till there are some other chars like '<' doesn't matter which one while counting how much spaces and tabs there are. Subsequently I create another char and write the separator(line) to it but there I just skip the spaces (with [chars+i]). This method works pretty good but the problem is if there are more than 5 tabs then it just don't work properly. I have absolutely no idea where the fault is.
for(int i = 0;i < lines;i++){
getline(codefile, buf);
char *separator = new char[buf.size()+1];
separator[buf.size()] = 0;
memcpy(separator,buf.c_str(),buf.size());
int chars = 0;
for(int j = 0; j <= sizeof(separator); j++){
if(isspace(separator[j])){
chars++;
}
else{
break;
}
}
char *newbuf= new char[buf.size()-chars+1];
newbuf[buf.size()-chars] = 0;
for(int k = 0; k <= buf.size()-chars+1; k++){
newbuf[k] = separator[chars+k];
}
if(i > lcounter){
cout << newbuf << i << endl;
}
}
Here is the snippet of the sourcecode from the website. You can see it at the image tag, at the closing figure tag and the p tag. They have more than 5 tabs (sorry I had to censor it).
<div class="xxx">
<article class="xxx" data-id="0">
<a href="link" class="tile" style="background-image:url('x.jpg');background-position:left center" data-more="<a href=x" data-clicks="<i class="fa fa-eye"></i>" data-teaserimg="x.jpg">
<time datetime="2015">
<span>2015</span>
</time>
<h1 class="title">
<span>x</span>
</h1>
<div class="x">x</div>
<div class="x">x</div>
<div class="x">
<figure class="x">
<img src="x.jpg" width="1" height="1" alt="">
</figure>
<p>
<strong>x</strong>xxx
</p>
</div>
</a>
Sorry I can't post a picture and I hope it is understandable.

Answer 1

sizeof(separator) should be strlen(separator)
sizeof is the size of the separator variable, not the length of the string. Since separator is a char* this is four bytes. Now do you see why your code doesn't work when you have more than five tabs?
And as others have pointed out there really is no reason to copy the string to the separator array. Why not just examine the characters where they are? isspace(buf[j]) works just as well as isspace(separator[j]).