Question

Given a string of words separated by whitespace. Need to replace whitespaces with comma ignoring whitespaces in quotes.

>>> some_string = 'one two "three four" five "six seven"'
>>> replace_func(some_string)
'one,two,"three four",five,"six seven"'

Here is the simple decision:

def replace_func(some_str):
    lines = []
    i = 1
    for l in struct.split('"'):
        if i % 2:
            lines.append(l.replace(' ', ',')
        else:
            lines.append(l)
        i += 1

    parsed_struct = '"'.join(lines)

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

This can be easily done with the help of shlex.split:

>>> import shlex
>>> ','.join(shlex.split(some_string))
'one,two,three four,five,six seven'

I you need to preserve quotation marks you can do this:

>>> ','.join(['"{0}"'.format(fragment) if ' ' in fragment else fragment
...           for fragment in shlex.split(some_string)])
'one,two,"three four",five,"six seven"'