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

Depending on your use case, you may also want to check out the csv module:

import csv
lines = ['this is "a string"', 'and more "stuff"']
for row in csv.reader(lines, delimiter=" "):
    print(row)

Output:

['this', 'is', 'a string']
['and', 'more', 'stuff']