I have a script that reads tab separated values from a file. It seems that if the file contains multiple tabs without data in between, explode and split return the second tab as the first character of the next string.

E.g:
$str = "text\tsome more\t\teven more";
$vals = explode("\t", $str);

and you get

$vals = array("text", "some more", "\teven more");

I would, of course, expect to get

$vals = array("text", "some more", "", "even more");

This is very annoying, I need to first replace every "\t\t" with something like "\t \t" and then check if some of the values is " " and convert it into "".

The same behaviour is found in split().