How do I read a tab delimited file?

Hi, I have a tab delimited file consisting of several lines, one record per line that I have to process. I don't see a function similar to "fgetcsv" for TABS so I've used the "file" function to read the whole file into an array, one line per array element. So far so good. Now I have to process each line and extract the fields. My question is, how do I search for the TAB character? Is it as simple as searching on the ascii code by using the "chr" function? If so, what value do I use in "chr" to look for TAB? Thanks, Don