splitting a long string into a list

[Tim Roberts]

"ronrsr" <ronrsr at gmail.com> wrote:

>I have a single long string - I'd like to split it into a list of
>unique keywords. Sadly, the database wasn't designed to do this, so I
>must do this in Python - I'm having some trouble using the .split()
>function, it doesn't seem to do what I want it to - any ideas?
>
>thanks very much for your help.
>
>r-sr-
>
>
>longstring = 'Agricultural subsidies; Foreign aidAgriculture;
>Sustainable Agriculture - Support; Organic Agriculture; Pesticides, US,
>Childhood Development, Birth Defects; Toxic ChemicalsAntibiotics,
>AnimalsAgricultural Subsidies, Global TradeAgricultural
>SubsidiesBiodiversityCitizen ActivismCommunity...

What do you want out of this?  It looks like there are several levels
crammed together here.  At first blush, it looks like topics separated by
"; ", so this should get you started:

  topics = longstring.split("; ")
-- 
Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.