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

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?

Try:

tr -s ' ' <text.txt | cut -d ' ' -f4

From the tr man page:

-s, --squeeze-repeats   replace each input sequence of a repeated character
                        that is listed in SET1 with a single occurrence
                        of that character