This idiom is what I ended up using (a lot it turns out!):
Parts = Line.split(";")
Parts += (x-len(Parts))*[""]where x knows how long the line should be. If the line already has more parts than x (i.e. [""] gets multiplied by a negative number) nothing seems to happen which is just fine in this program's case. Bob -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
