In response to Jonathan's answer above, this only seems to work for certain delimiters. For example:
>>> a='Beautiful, is; better*than\nugly'
>>> import re
>>> re.split('; |, |\*|\n',a)
['Beautiful', 'is', 'better', 'than', 'ugly']
>>> b='1999-05-03 10:37:00'
>>> re.split('- :', b)
['1999-05-03 10:37:00']
By putting the delimiters in square brackets it seems to work more effectively.
>>> re.split('[- :]', b)
['1999', '05', '03', '10', '37', '00']
