Reading socket binary data?

[Michael Simpson]

How would a Python developer handle the following case.  I'm a C++ developer
looking at Python as a new language to learn.

In C:

struct FOO
{
short a;
char b;
long c;
}

I can read something into a data object using the sizeof(FOO)

i.e. recv(socket, buffer, sizeof(FOO),....

In Python, I get

data = socket.recv(1024)

How to I translate data to a struct FOO type or a series of objects that
represent those fields?

Thanks,
Padawan