Oliver - Here is a simpler approach, hopefully more readable, using pyparsing (at http://pyparsing.sourceforge.net). I also added another test word to your sample input line, one consisting of a lone pair of double quotes, signifying an empty string. (Be sure to remove leading '.'s from Python text - necessary to retain program indentation which Google Groups otherwise collapses.)
-- Paul .data = r""" .(\HasNoChildren) "." "INBOX.Sent Items" "" .""" . .from pyparsing import printables,Word,dblQuotedString,OneOrMore . .nonQuoteChars = "".join( [ c for c in printables if c not in '"'] ) .word = Word(nonQuoteChars) | dblQuotedString . .words = OneOrMore(word) . .for s in words.parseString(data): . print ">%s<" % s . Gives: >(\HasNoChildren)< >"."< >"INBOX.Sent Items"< >""< But really, I'm guessing that you'd rather not have the quote characters in there either. It's simple enough to have pyparsing remove them when a dblQuotedString is found: .# add a parse action to remove the double quote characters .# one of the beauties of parse actions is that there is no need to .# verify that the first and last characters are "'s - this function .# is never called unless the tokens in tokenslist match the .# required expression .def removeDblQuotes(st,loc,tokenslist): . return tokenslist[0][1:-1] .dblQuotedString.setParseAction( removeDblQuotes ) . .for s in words.parseString(data): . print ">%s<" % s . Gives: >(\HasNoChildren)< >.< >INBOX.Sent Items< >< -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
