converting from perl: variable sized unpack

[John Machin]

Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote in message news:<roy-B2459F.22112513072001 at news1.panix.com>...
> What's the best way to translate this perl snippet into python:
> 
>  ($f1, $f2, $f3, $f4, $f5, $f6) = split ('\s+', $line);
> 
> The obvious translation would be:
> 
>  [f1, f2, f3, f4, f5, f6] = string.split (line)
> 
> but the problem is that line may have fewer than 6 fields on it.  Perl 
> handles this smoothly by leaving the "extra" variables undefined, whereas 
> python raises a ValueError exception.  What I'd like to do is have the 
> extra field variables left as null strings.

Try this:

f1, f2, f3, f4, f5, f6, extra_guff = (line.split(None, 6) + 7 * [""])[:7]
if extra_guff:
    print "Oops! More data than expected!"
    # or, more likely, an unintended space in a data field

Smooth enough?