As pointed out by Martijn Pieters,Your code should work fine, provided your file have regular spaces as separators. The only difference from the result you are expecting is that the tokens will of the type unicode and not str.
There are some other unicode characters used to represent whitespaces http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Unicode, maybe this is causing the mess, even the readline can be problematic if this is the case...