Question: I have a file containing lines like

```
12  45 some text
56 78      #another type of text
22     34 after column 2 are other data

```

I need to split each line storing the two first elements in two variables and the text after the second column in one variable. In C, using sscanf() this can be accomplished as

```
sscanf(line,"%d %d %s",&a,&b,textArray);

```

I know about [scanf python module](https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/scanf/) but apparently it is not standard and it is not included in Debian.

How can you do this using the standard Python tools?

Answer: 
[split](https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html?highlight=split#string.split) is all you need.

```
 line.split(None, 2)

```

Docs for split with emphasis added:

> 
> string.split(s[, sep[, maxsplit]])
> 
> 
> Return a list of the words of the string s. **If the optional second argument sep is absent or None, the words are separated by arbitrary strings of whitespace characters (space, tab, newline, return, formfeed).** If the second argument sep is present and not None, it specifies a string to be used as the word separator. The returned list will then have one more item than the number of non-overlapping occurrences of the separator in the string. If maxsplit is given, at most maxsplit number of splits occur, and the remainder of the string is returned as the final element of the list (thus, the list will have at most maxsplit+1 elements). If maxsplit is not specified or -1, then there is no limit on the number of splits (all possible splits are made).
> 
> 
> The behavior of split on an empty string depends on the value of sep. If sep is not specified, or specified as None, the result will be an empty list. If sep is specified as any string, the result will be a list containing one element which is an empty string.
> 
> 
>
With the assumption that your first elements of the string are numbers I would suggest some thing like

```py
def split(line):

  list0= line.split()
  list1 = [y for y in list0 if y.isdigit() ]
  rest = ' '.join([c for c in list0 if c not in list1[:2]])

  a = list1[0]
  b = list1[2]
  return a,b,rest

# ex:

print split('22     34 after column 2 are other data')

# output >> ('22', '2', 'after column 2 are other data')

```