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 spaces within quotes. The result I'm looking for is:

['this','is','a test']

Answer 1

You want split, from the shlex module.

>>> import shlex 

>>> shlex.split('this is "a test"') 

['this', 'is', 'a test']