Don't split double-quoted words with Python string split()?

Question

When using the Python string function split(), does anybody have a nifty trick to treat items surrounded by double-quotes as a non-splitting word?

Say I want to spli

Answer 1

I suggest you search with re for the pattern "[^"]*" and apply string.split only on the remaining parts. You could implement a recursive function that processes all relevant string parts.

Answer 2

@Rob: why without regexes if the regexp solution is so simple?

my_str = 'A B\t"C" DE "FE"\t\t"GH I JK L" "" ""\t"O P   Q" R'
print re.findall(r'(\w+|".*?")', my_str)
['A', 'B', '"C"', 'DE', '"FE"', '"GH I JK L"', '""', '""', '"O P   Q"', 'R']

Answer 3

You won't be able to get this behaviour with str.split(). If you can live with the rather complex parsing it does (like ignoring double quotes preceded by a back slash), shlex.split() might be what you are looking for:

>>> shlex.split(myStr)
['A', 'B', 'C', 'DE', 'FE', 'GH I JK L', '', '', 'O P   Q', 'R']