Question

I need to be able to take a string like:

'''foo, bar, 'one, two', three four''' 

into:

['foo', 'bar', 'one, two', 'three four'] 

I have an feeling (with hints from #python) that the solution is going to involve the shlex module.

Answer 1

The shlex module solution allows escaped quotes, one quote escape another, and all fancy stuff shell supports.

>>> import shlex >>> my_splitter = shlex.shlex('''foo, bar, 'one, two', three four''', posix=True) >>> my_splitter.whitespace += ',' >>> my_splitter.whitespace_split = True >>> print list(my_splitter) ['foo', 'bar', 'one, two', 'three', 'four'] 

escaped quotes example:

>>> my_splitter = shlex.shlex(''''test, a','foo,bar',baz',bar \xc3\xa4 baz''',                               posix=True)  >>> my_splitter.whitespace = ',' ; my_splitter.whitespace_split = True  >>> print list(my_splitter) ['test, a', 'foo,bar',baz', 'bar \xc3\xa4 baz']