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

Speed test of different answers:

import re
import shlex
import csv

line = 'this is "a test"'

%timeit [p for p in re.split("( |\\\".*?\\\"|'.*?')", line) if p.strip()]
100000 loops, best of 3: 5.17 µs per loop

%timeit re.findall(r'[^"\s]\S*|".+?"', line)
100000 loops, best of 3: 2.88 µs per loop

%timeit list(csv.reader([line], delimiter=" "))
The slowest run took 9.62 times longer than the fastest. This could mean that an intermediate result is being cached.
100000 loops, best of 3: 2.4 µs per loop

%timeit shlex.split(line)
10000 loops, best of 3: 50.2 µs per loop