How to make the ‘cut’ command treat same sequental delimiters as one?

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I’m trying to extract a certain (the fourth) field from the column-based, ‘space’-adjusted text stream. I’m trying to use the cut command in the following manner:

cat text.txt | cut -d " " -f 4

Unfortunately, cut doesn’t treat several spaces as one delimiter. I could have piped through awk

awk '{ printf $4; }'

or sed

sed -E "s/[[:space:]]+/ /g"

to collapse the spaces, but I’d like to know if there any way to deal with cut and several delimiters natively?

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