Using regex to remove the first occurrence of white space and then replace the rest of the tabs with commas

Question

Because I have lines like

space space **da ta** tab tab **data**
tab **data** tab tab tab tab **da ta**

I want the above to turn into

Answer 1

s/^[ \t]+//;  # remove leading whitespace (just once)
s/[ \t]+/,/g; # replace all runs of spaces into commas globally