Actually, you may have problems with the tab searching,
because these get converted to several blanks in a row
when read by IO.readlines -
but that can be corrected by letting a column separator
be at least n blanks wide and searching for that -
say, for at least 5 blanks as a separator -
if x=~/ {5,}/
# first alternative
else
# second alternative
end
Sorry for the confusion..
Best regards
Axel