I'm working on what should be a simple problem.

I pulling an address out of an ldap query and the data is in the form of a $-separated string. Example:

101 Main St.$Anytown$MN$12345

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I could probably do <dtml-call "REQUEST.set('parsed_address', _.string.join(old_address, '$')"> except for the fact that getting "old_address" (the $-separated one) would require its own <dtml-var old_address> statement. I can't nest <dtml>s so how to I combine these?

I'm not sure I get you right. try something like (untested): <dtml-call "REQUEST.set('parse_address', _string.split(old_address, '$')"> for parsing the string

Second question... Once I've got my string parsed into a list called "parsed_string", what's the syntax for accessing certain elements of the list?

By slicing: <dtml-call "parsed_string[0]"> gets you the first element parsed_string[1] the second etc parsed_string[1:] is everything after the second ;-) element of the list parsed_string[:5] is everything up to element 6 parsed_string[1:5] is everything from element 2 to element 6 parsed_string[-1] is the last element of the list. If you want to know more, you should probably look at the Python docs, as this is Python stuff.

P.S. Maybe I should do this in an external or python method, but I thought it would be overkill for a single operation like this. Am I wrong?

No, I think you're right, but others may disagree. hth Rik