converting from perl: variable sized unpack

[James Logajan]

Joal Heagney wrote:
> I've noticed that everyone is using string.split. Is there a reason why
> we aren't using the .split() function of strings? They work the same way
> in all these examples, so I was wondering was this because they aren't
> supported in python 1.5?

You hit the nail squarely: I have 1.5.2 on my machine and recently wrote a
Python program that had users whose own machines had 1.5.2 and they couldn't
or didn't want to upgrade.