Never give up! Here is why:
Actually, the CSV Reader node and also the File Reader node (if uncheck “ignore spaces and tabs”) preserve tabs but we cannot see them!! Just try the Cell Splitter with \t as delimiter and you will be surprised!
Here is an example workflow in which I have used both nodes to read a CSV file similar to your case and split it to have all fields as strings:
csv_tab.knwf (24.0 KB)
Pure KNIME, like it?
