Quoted strings are surprisingly stateful, so that using a parser isn't totally out of line. Here is a pyparsing example with some added test cases. Pyparsing's quotedString built-in handles single or double quotes (if you don't want to be this permissive, there are also sglQuotedString and dblQuotedString to choose from), plus escaped quote characters.
The snippet below includes two samples. The first 3 lines give the equivalent to other suggestions on this thread. It is followed by a slightly enhanced version that strips quotation marks from any quoted entries. -- Paul (get pyparsing at http://pyparsing.sourceforge.net) ========== from pyparsing import * test = r'''spam 'it don\'t mean a thing' "the life of brian" 42 'the meaning of "life"' grail''' print OneOrMore( quotedString | Word(printables) ).parseString( test ) # strip quotes during parsing def stripQuotes(s,l,toks): return toks[0][1:-1] quotedString.setParseAction( stripQuotes ) print OneOrMore( quotedString | Word(printables) ).parseString( test ) ========== returns: ['spam', "'it don\\'t mean a thing'", '"the life of brian"', '42', '\'the meaning of "life"\'', 'grail'] ['spam', "it don\\'t mean a thing", 'the life of brian', '42', 'the meaning of "life"', 'grail'] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
