You met split() with lists. It is the workhorse of reading structured text. With a separator, it splits exactly on that string:

line = "Ada,36,London"
name, age, city = line.split(",")
print(name)
print(int(age) + 1)

Splitting straight into separate variables like that is called unpacking; Unit 12 covers it properly. It only works when the number of pieces matches the number of names.

Two more useful forms:

print("a b  c".split())
print("a b  c".split(" "))
print("key=value=more".split("=", 1))

split() with no argument treats any run of spaces as one gap. split(" ") splits on every single space, giving empty strings between doubled spaces. The second argument limits how many splits happen.