Splitting a common deliverative to individual variables. Python

I have written and simple program in python that monitors a COM port and converts the line into a string. I then use decode to Ascii which is working fine. My problem is that I need to split the string into seperate variables.

String:

1,40.20,23.50,NOW()

I would like to split them to to seperate variables like the following example:

a    = 1
b    = 40.20
c    = 23.50
d    = NOW()

>Solution :

If you know the number of objects then you can just split on the , and assign the elements:

a, b, c, d = txt.split(',')