Inconsistency of WriteString

Question

Important Note

A kernel or maybe Front End restart probably fixed the problem. I did something weird today which is evaluate Context[StringQ]="test`", perhaps that was the problem (I thought I quit the kernel after that, but maybe not). I am unable reproduce the error now. It may be difficult to track the problem down. I am using version 10.4 on OSX 10.10.

Original question

We can use WriteString with a path or a stream as its first argument. There appears to be an inconsistency with how tabs are handled in these cases.

Note that WriteLine appends to files, so for simplicity I will assume that we are writing to an empty file. I define a function which I think is supposed to be equivalent in this case to WriteString with a path as its first argument, as follows.

SetDirectory[$TemporaryDirectory];
writeStringUsingStream[path_, string_] :=
 Module[
  {stream},
  stream = OpenWrite[path];
  WriteString[stream, string];
  Close@stream;
  ]

Now we test it. I use DeleteFile because the comparison in case the file already exists is distracting/confusing/irrelevant.

string = "hello \t bye";
SetDirectory[$TemporaryDirectory];
If[FileExistsQ["myFile"], DeleteFile["myFile"]]
If[FileExistsQ["myFileUS"], DeleteFile["myFileUS"]]
WriteString["myFile", string]
writeStringUsingStream["myFileUS", string];
ReadString["myFile"] // FullForm
ReadString["myFileUS"] // FullForm

"hello \\[RawTab] bye"
"hello \t bye"

Is this a bug? Or did I mess something up?

Answer 1

This isn't much of an answer, but I don't want the question to show up as unanswered.

A kernel or maybe Front End restart probably fixed the problem. I did something weird today which is evaluate Context[StringQ]="test`", perhaps that was the problem (I thought I quit the kernel after that, but maybe not).