Basic usage question involving "cut"

[Linda Walsh]

Don't know if this is the appropriate place for this, but if it
isn't possible, I could "suggest" that it might be considered a
bug or at least a "design deficiency". :-)

Something that's always bothered me about "cut".  It seems it has
at least two ways to define fields, that I'm aware of: defining
by character position and defining by a delimiter.

What I don't know how to do is how to select a "whitespace"
delimited field.  It's one of the more common field delimiters I
run into.  The easiest, but rather inefficient methods is to
pipe the input into a shell-based "while read field1, field2..."
loop, but it sure would make sense if there was an option
to "cut" to handle white-space delimited fields.

Is there an option to "cut" that I don't know about, or am I
looking in the wrong place for this type of functionality,
or is this a feature "deficit", in "cut", that needs remedying?

Thanks,
Linda