title: String splitting like sscanf in Python
body: <p>I have a file containing lines like</p>
  
  <pre><code>12  45 some text
  56 78      #another type of text
  22     34 after column 2 are other data
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>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</p>
  
  <pre><code>sscanf(line,"%d %d %s",&amp;a,&amp;b,textArray);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I know about <a href="https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/scanf/" rel="nofollow">scanf python module</a> but apparently it is not standard and it is not included in Debian.</p>
  
  <p>How can you do this using the standard Python tools?</p>