Newbie: Working with large database -- help!

[Owen Marshall]

Ok. First off, I am fairly new to Python. So don't flame me if there is a
very obvious solution =)

I am trying to work with a file -- for lack of better terms, a database. The
data is like this:

data|data|data|data

and so on as needed. My question: how do I extract each part of data from
between the " | " (none of the data has fixed lengths), and put it in a list
where I can do some work with it? Changing the database format itself is not
an option, though. Any ideas?

Owen T. Marshall