带有不规则空格和制表符的文件按列分割/爆炸

So I have a very old file with thousands of lines (I guess generated by hand) and I'm trying to move them into a rdb, but the lines don't have a format/pattern to convert into columns. Say for example the lines in the file looks like:

blah   blahsdfas    laslkdlasdj      aksdjla
sldks  slslsl      lsdlksldj           lsdjlfslk

I could say it has four fields when I look at it, primarily tried using awk but it wasn't printing the column as expected because the space between a column is not tab or with an equal space count.

You guys think its possible to extract? If yes can someone help with a php snippet?

Using preg_split(), you can break the line up using one or more whitespace characters as the delimiters:

$lines = file('filename', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES);
foreach($lines as $line)
{
    $pieces = preg_split('/\s+/', $line);
    // do something with pieces
}

It looks like preg_split('/\s{2,}/', $line) would split this apart. That'd split on two or more whitespace characters.

If this has been maintained by hand, you may have to do manual cleanup (e.g., maybe someone typed two spaces but didn't intend to start the next column). At only thousands of lines, manual cleanup is thankfully on tedious, not impossible.