In my project I have two UNO’s communicating (one way) thru serial. Sending and receiving is easy, parsing the received data to something useful was a bit more tricky 
But my string was a bit complicated due to different data types. Take a look at my code and see if it could help you:
Cheap(est) RF 433 Mhz bridge for home automation with both Tx and Rx
In short: A string like <1912830,1,15,0,-1> is sent where < and > are start/end markers for the transmission. The markers are removed and the string 1912830,1,15,0,-1 is parsed with some magic to correct variables 