Using re module better

[Mike]

I seem to fall into this trap (maybe my Perl background) where I want
to simultaneously test a regular expression and then extract its match
groups in the same action. For instance:

if (match = re.search('(\w+)\s*(\w+)', foo)):
field1 = match.group(1)
field2 = match.group(2)
...

(compare to Perl:)

if($foo =~ /(\w+)\s*(\w+)/) {
$field1 = $1;
$field2 = $2;
...
}

Problem is, my python is invalid above. What's the pythonic way to do
this?

Thanks in advance O Python Charmers

Mike