Regular expression to match comma separated list of key=value where value can contain commas

Question

I have a naive \"parser\" that simply does something like:
[x.split(\'=\') for x in mystring.split(\',\')]

However mystring can be something like<

Answer 1

Assuming that the name of the key never contains ,, you can split at , when the next sequence without , and = is succeeded by =.

re.split(r',(?=[^,=]+=)', inputString)

(This is the same as my original solution. I expect re.split to be used, rather than re.findall or str.split).

The full solution can be done in one-liner:

[re.findall('(.*?)=(.*)', token)[0] for token in re.split(r',(?=[^,=]+=)', inputString)]