title: How to make separator in pandas read_csv more flexible wrt whitespace, for irregular separators?
body: <p>I need to create a data frame by reading in data from a file, using <code>read_csv</code> method. However, the separators are not very regular: some columns are separated by tabs (<code>\t</code>), other are separated by spaces. Moreover, some columns can be separated by 2 or 3 or more spaces or even by a combination of spaces and tabs (for example 3 spaces, two tabs and then 1 space).</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to tell pandas to treat these files properly?</p>
  
  <p>By the way, I do not have this problem if I use Python. I use:</p>
  
  <pre><code>for line in file(file_name):
     fld = line.split()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And it works perfect. It does not care if there are 2 or 3 spaces between the fields. Even combinations of spaces and tabs do not cause any problem. Can pandas do the same?</p>