Don't split double-quoted words with Python string split()?

Question

When using the Python string function split(), does anybody have a nifty trick to treat items surrounded by double-quotes as a non-splitting word?

Say I want to spli

Answer 1

You won't be able to get this behaviour with str.split(). If you can live with the rather complex parsing it does (like ignoring double quotes preceded by a back slash), shlex.split() might be what you are looking for:

>>> shlex.split(myStr)
['A', 'B', 'C', 'DE', 'FE', 'GH I JK L', '', '', 'O P   Q', 'R']