a function for string splitting

["Luis O. Silva" <silva@paloma.spbu.ru>]

Dear Emacs community,

I'm writing a function for translating dates in the form of a
string into Spanish and Russian. For example, you have:

"Thu, 21 Nov 2002 16:05:50 -0600 (CST)"

Within my function I used a `let' expression of the form:

(let ((day (substring "Thu, 21 Nov 2002 16:05:50 -0600 (CST)" 0 3))
       (month (substring "Thu, 21 Nov 2002 16:05:50 -0600 (CST)" 8 11)))
       ...)

All works fine provided that there isn't any date with
one-digit day, i. e., "Fri, 8 Nov 2002 11:56:37 -0500 (CST)"

My question is what function I could use for correctly
splitting the string.

Please be indulgent with me since

1. I'm not a programmer
2. I don't have access to the elisp manual even on-line (my
connection is very slow, only sufficient to download my
e-mail).

Thank you very much in advance
luis



-- 
Luis Octavio Silva P.
St. Petersburg State University.
66/3 Botanicheskaya St., Apt.119/2
Stary Peterhof
St. Petersburg, Russia.