How , I just posted on something similar earlier ;) Ok first of all you might want to try shlex it is in the standard library. If you don't know what cStringIO is dont worry about it it is just to give a file like object to pass to shlex. If you have a file just pass it in opened. example: a = shlex.shlex(open('mytxt.txt','r'))
py>import cStringIO py>d = cStringIO.StringIO() py>d.write('moo cow "farmer john" -zug') py>d.seek(0) py>a = shlex.shlex(d) py>a.get_token() 'moo' py>a.get_token() 'cow' py>a.get_token() '"farmer john"' py>a.get_token() '-' py>a.get_token() 'zug' py>a.get_token() '' # ok we try again this time we add - to valid chars so we can get it grouped as a single token . py>d.seek(0) py>a = shlex.shlex(d) py>a.wordchars += '-' # add the hyphen py>a.get_token() 'moo' py>a.get_token() 'cow' py>a.get_token() '"farmer john"' py>a.get_token() '-zug' py>a.get_token() '' Hth, M.E.Farmer -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list