String question

[Dennis Gurnick]

Does Python(1.6) have built-in string functions for trimming or extracting
portion of strings?

I would like to do the following

(prototype)
text = "here is some text"
seek = "is"
start = string.find( text, seek )
theWord = text.grabxxxxx( start, len(seek ) )

Regards,

Dennis

P.S.  I've read the online docs, and I've seen that it is possible if you
are taking a known value (i.e. theWord = text[100:])  ... simply stuck on
semantics.