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

Have a look at the shlex module, particularly shlex.split.

>>> import shlex
>>> shlex.split('This is "a test"')
['This', 'is', 'a test']