title: parsing a tab-separated file in Python
body: <p>I'm trying to parse a tab-separated file in Python where a number placed k tabs apart from the beginning of a row, should be placed into the k-th array.  </p>
  
  <p>Is there a built-in function to do this, or a better way, other than reading line by line and do all the obvious processing a naive solution would perform?</p>