cat command in sh and tabs

Hi guys, I'm writing an assignment for a programming course and I'm using cat to cat out 8 lines of a file to be used later
curSection=`cat $FILENAME|head -$start|tail -8`
I found that if the original file contains tabs in those lines, curSection will not have tabs but a space for each tab. I need to keep track of the tabs that existed in the original, any ideas how to do this?(tabs and spaces both exist in the original) As simple as possible please

many thanks

Jay

see

man tab

OP should use double quotes:

echo "$curSection"

or else use

print "$curSection"