How can i parse a comma delimited string into a list (caveat)?

Question

I need to be able to take a string like:

\'\'\'foo, bar, \"one, two\", three four\'\'\'

into:

[\'foo\', \'bar\', \'one, two         


        

Answer 1

The shlex module solution allows escaped quotes, one quote escape another, and all fancy stuff shell supports.

>>> import shlex
>>> my_splitter = shlex.shlex('''foo, bar, "one, two", three four''', posix=True)
>>> my_splitter.whitespace += ','
>>> my_splitter.whitespace_split = True
>>> print list(my_splitter)
['foo', 'bar', 'one, two', 'three', 'four']

escaped quotes example:

>>> my_splitter = shlex.shlex('''"test, a",'foo,bar",baz',bar \xc3\xa4 baz''',
                              posix=True) 
>>> my_splitter.whitespace = ',' ; my_splitter.whitespace_split = True 
>>> print list(my_splitter)
['test, a', 'foo,bar",baz', 'bar \xc3\xa4 baz']