It turns out that python has a "regular expression" methods library re. re has a split function and you don't have to give it both tab and space characters, \s+ is all you need The \s apparently covers all white space characters and + includes any combination of them. To wit:
line = 'one\ttwo\t\tthree four \tfive \t\tsix'
re.split('\s+', line)
['one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five', 'six']
(source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8113782/split-string-on-whitespace-in-python)
Also learned: This link shows that | is used to delimit multiple split options in the same re:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4998629/python-split-string-with-multiple-delimiters
