Question

I have a string which is like this:

this is "a test" 

I’m trying to write something in Python to split it up by space while ignoring spaces within quotes. The result I’m looking for is:

['this', 'is', 'a test'] 

PS. I know you are going to ask "what happens if there are quotes within the quotes, well, in my application, that will never happen.

Answer 1

You want split, from the built-in shlex module.

>>> import shlex >>> shlex.split('this is "a test"') ['this', 'is', 'a test'] 

This should do exactly what you want.

If you want to preserve the quotation marks, then you can pass the posix=False kwarg.

>>> shlex.split('this is "a test"', posix=False) ['this', 'is', '"a test"']