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

Posted by Adam Pierce on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Adam Pierce
Published on 2008-09-17T04:25:15Z Indexed on 2010/03/16 21:51 UTC
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python

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regex

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 spaces within quotes. The result I'm looking for is:

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

PS. I know you are going to ask "what happens if there are quotes within the quotes, well, in my application, that will never happen.

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