Explode a string into an array by tabulation

I would have thought that was super simple, but here :

I want to "explode" a string into an array by tabulation and do a treatment into each string.

For information, the string comme from a mysql execution, so this string represent a row. Each field are separated by a tabulation (hence why I'm looking for exploding the string), can contain "\t" "\n" that I want to be a real tabulation / feed line, and can contain "\r\n" that I want to be replaced by "\n".

I had this function that I thought did the job

function MySQL__Untreated_String_To_Treated_Array() { local pstr_untreated_string local ltstr_treated_string_list local lstr_treated_string # Initialisation pstr_untreated_string="$1" gtReturnFonction=() # String treatment while IFS=$'\t' read -r -a ltstr_treated_string_list; do for lstr_treated_string in "${ltstr_treated_string_list[@]}"; do gtReturnFonction+=( "$(printf "%b" "$lstr_treated_string")" ) done done < <(echo "$pstr_untreated_string" | sed 's/\r\\n/\\n/g' | sed 's/\r/\\n/g') } 

BUT if my input string have multiple consecutive tabulation, it will not appear. I didn't knew, but it seem to be the normal behavior.

Then I tried multiple answer/code, but to no avail.

What I want is :

input = "" result = ( "" ) input = "\t" result = ( "" "" ) input = "\t\t" result = ( "" "" "" ) 

And ultimatly

input = "\t_SECOND_FIELD_\t\t_FOURTH_\\\t_FIELD\t_FIFTH_\r\n_FIELD_\t" result = ( "" "_SECOND_FIELD_" "" "_FOURTH_ _FIELD" "_FIFTH_ _FIELD_" "" ) 

I tried to use readarray, but failed too.

My bash version is 4.2.46 if this is important.