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 spaces within quotes. The result I'm looking for is:
['this', 'is', 'a test']
PS. I know you are going to ask "what happens if there are quotes within the quotes, well, in my application, that will never happen.
You want split, from the built-in shlex module.
>>> import shlex
>>> shlex.split('this is "a test"')
['this', 'is', 'a test']
This should do exactly what you want.
If you want to preserve the quotation marks, then you can pass the posix=False kwarg.
>>> shlex.split('this is "a test"', posix=False)
['this', 'is', '"a test"']
I see regex approaches here that look complex and/or wrong. This surprises me, because regex syntax can easily describe "whitespace or thing-surrounded-by-quotes", and most regex engines (including Python's) can split on a regex. So if you're going to use regexes, why not just say exactly what you mean?:
test = 'this is "a test"' # or "this is 'a test'"
# pieces = [p for p in re.split("( |[\\\"'].*[\\\"'])", test) if p.strip()]
# From comments, use this:
pieces = [p for p in re.split("( |\\\".*?\\\"|'.*?')", test) if p.strip()]
Explanation:
[\\\"'] = double-quote or single-quote
.* = anything
( |X) = space or X
.strip() = remove space and empty-string separators
shlex probably provides more features, though.