Newline, carriage return, tab characters in string ignored in android

I am trying to find a way of displaying a variable length multi line text string property with correct formatting of new lines and tabs. Using anything like a button or a text box this works as expected on the windows home designer but in android (v12 I believe) the characters are ignored. The string is viewable only but has columns ( id, starttime, temperature) and I wanted them aligned properly as columns

I have tried other ways such as URL encoding and html tags (
) but these are just shown as is.

Is there any combination of control/ codes that will work on android devices? Newline is needed, tab is very useful but not essential.

I have a long winded work around by turning the string into an array and using grid view but this is less than ideal.