Question

I’m making a basic language. Well, not exactly, but you’ll see. Now, I did echo and exit commands, but I need help.

If I give it a string ‘echo “hello bob”‘ I want it to split it up, and give me an array like so [echo, Hello Bob]. Now, I have echo working, but with only ONE word. So I can do –> ‘echo bob’, and it will output ‘bob’. But, If I do ‘echo hi bob’ it will output ‘hi’. And I always want it to do that. If I have a command foo, I want to do ‘foo “bar face” boo’ and get [foo, bar face, boo]. So basically I want to do myArr.split(‘ ‘) except for anything in between quotes. How can I do this?

Answer 1

Here is a simple answer:

>>> import shlex
>>> shlex.split('echo "hello bob"')
['echo', 'hello bob']

shlex is a module that helps with parsing shell-like languages.

The documentation can be found here (thank you, JIStone): http://docs.python.org/library/shlex.html