"J. W. McCall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > I need to split a string as per string.strip(), but with a > modification: I want it to recognize quoted strings and return them as > one list item, regardless of any whitespace within the quoted string. > > For example, given the string: > > 'spam "the life of brian" 42' > > I'd want it to return: > > ['spam', 'the life of brian', '42'] > > I see no standard library function to do this, so what would be the > most simple way to achieve this? This should be simple, but I must be > tired as I'm not currently able to think of an elegant way to do this. > > Any ideas?
How about the csv module? It seems like it might be overkill, but it does already handle that sort of quoting >>> import csv >>> csv.reader(['spam "the life of brian" 42'], delimiter=' ').next() ['spam', 'the life of brian', '42'] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
