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

I use shlex.split to process 70,000,000 lines of squid log, it's so slow. So I switched to re.

Please try this, if you have performance problem with shlex.

import re

def line_split(line):
    return re.findall(r'[^"\s]\S*|".+?"', line)