title: read in bash on whitespace-delimited file without empty fields collapsing
body: <p>I'm trying to read a multi-line tab-separated file in bash. The format is such that empty fields are expected. Unfortunately, the shell is collapsing together field separators which are next to each other, as so:</p>
  
  <pre><code># IFS=$'\t'
  # read one two three &lt;&lt;&lt;$'one\t\tthree'
  # printf '&lt;%s&gt; ' "$one" "$two" "$three"; printf '\n'
  &lt;one&gt; &lt;three&gt; &lt;&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>...as opposed to the desired output of <code>&lt;one&gt; &lt;&gt; &lt;three&gt;</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Can this be resolved without resorting to a separate language (such as awk)?</p>