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

To get around the unicode issues in some Python 2 versions, I suggest:

from shlex import split as _split
split = lambda a: [b.decode('utf-8') for b in _split(a.encode('utf-8'))]