How do you read up to a specific character in a line of text?

[darktemp]

I have a line of characters that need to be separated. One example is like this:

513413;dialog_513413;Sally Mae has some jobs for you.;

Three sets of data all split into three groups placed in one line. What I would like to do is be able to read each group up to the semicolon (obviously without including it when it becomes displayed or used in the program).

So in conclusion I would just like to know a method that can either count or read the string (from a file) up to the semicolon. I am aware of string.read(size), but obviously size is needed and it is variable. Highly prefer having size given also.

Thanks! :)

[bvdet]

String method split() was made for situations like this.

>>> line = "513413;dialog_513413;Sally Mae has some jobs for you.;"
>>> line.split(";")[0]
'513413'
>>> for item in line.split(";"):
...     print item
...     
513413
dialog_513413
Sally Mae has some jobs for you.
 
>>> 

[darktemp]

Thanks again bvdet! :]