If you can't get text parsing to work using the accepted answer (e.g if your text file contains non uniform rows) then it's worth trying with Python's csv library - here's an example using a user defined Dialect:
import csv
csv.register_dialect('skip_space', skipinitialspace=True)
with open(my_file, 'r') as f:
reader=csv.reader(f , delimiter=' ', dialect='skip_space')
for item in reader:
print(item)