Split long String into lists with limited length

Chunk String

### useful when parsing strings to paragraphs
### to reassemble from lists with each element
### having a maximum length
### useful for low level reportlab pdf creation

### usage: stripLongString("My Very Extra Long String", maximumLengthINTEGER)
### Returns an array

def chunkstring(string, length):
    #got this from http://stackoverflow.com/a/18854817/1278994
    return [string[0+i:length+i] for i in range(0, len(string), length)]

def stripLongString(string, length):

    a = []
    new=[]

    # this for loop checks if there are "words" exceeding the "length" limit
    # if there are, we will split them into chunks of max. "length" elements
    for word in string.split():
        if len(word) > length:
            new = chunkstring(word, length)
            a = a + new
        else:
            a.append(word)

    out = []
    bunk = []

    # now let's iterate over each "word" (including the chunks from above)
    # and see if when combining them, we exceed the "length" limit
    # when we exceed, that's the point to stop adding them together
    for idx, i in enumerate(a):
        if bunk != []:
            if len(" ".join(bunk) + " " + i) > length:
                out.append(" ".join(bunk))
                bunk = []
            elif idx + 1 == len(a):
                bunk.append(i)
                out.append(" ".join(bunk))
            else:
                bunk.append(i)
        if bunk == []:
            bunk.append(i)
            if idx+1 == len(a):
                out.append(i)
    return out