It looks like that might work - lassign would have let me parse through each instance of $fields and set each as a variable with it's own name.
I think I can use lindex to select records one at a time based upon their location in the list, but I'm not clear on how to then set that record as a new variable.
For a little context - I'm trying to read an http page that has a list of strings (currently seperated by colons, but could be seperated by anything.) Then, once I have that list, I want to take each item and set it as an individual variable, which I'm then going to store and use elsewhere. So, really, I just need a decent way to read the list and store the values found there.