Parsing string into fixed-width pieces

[Kragen Sitaker]

"Johnson, Brad" <brad-g-johnson at uiowa.edu> writes:
> I'm new to Python and have been combing the documentation and the message
> archive here for information on splitting a string into fix-width pieces.  I
> assume their is an easy way to do this, I just don't seem to be able to find
> it in the reference material.  Any suggestions?

Is this to unpack some fixed-width record format?  The struct module
is used for fixed-width record formats:
>>> import struct
>>> struct.unpack('3s4s3s', 'asdfghijkl')
('asd', 'fghi', 'jkl')

HTH.