Split a string by spaces — preserving quoted substrings — in Python

Question

I have a string which is like this:

this is \"a test\"

I\'m trying to write something in Python to split it up by space while ignoring spac

Answer 1

It seems that for performance reasons re is faster. Here is my solution using a least greedy operator that preserves the outer quotes:

re.findall("(?:\".*?\"|\S)+", s)

Result:

['this', 'is', '"a test"']

It leaves constructs like aaa"bla blub"bbb together as these tokens are not separated by spaces. If the string contains escaped characters, you can match like that:

>>> a = "She said \"He said, \\\"My name is Mark.\\\"\""
>>> a
'She said "He said, \\"My name is Mark.\\""'
>>> for i in re.findall("(?:\".*?[^\\\\]\"|\S)+", a): print(i)
...
She
said
"He said, \"My name is Mark.\""

Please note that this also matches the empty string "" by means of the \S part of the pattern.