How to parse strings to look like sys.argv

Question

I would like to parse a string like this:

-o 1  --long "Some long string"   

into this:

["-o", "1", "--long", 'Some long string'] 

or similar.

This is different than either getopt, or optparse, which start with sys.argv parsed input (like the output I have above). Is there a standard way to do this? Basically, this is "splitting" while keeping quoted strings together.

My best function so far:

import csv def split_quote(string,quotechar='"'):     '''      >>> split_quote('--blah "Some argument" here')     ['--blah', 'Some argument', 'here']      >>> split_quote("--blah 'Some argument' here", quotechar="'")     ['--blah', 'Some argument', 'here']     '''     s = csv.StringIO(string)     C = csv.reader(s, delimiter=" ",quotechar=quotechar)     return list(C)[0] 

Answer 1

I believe you want the shlex module.

>>> import shlex >>> shlex.split('-o 1 --long "Some long string"') ['-o', '1', '--long', 'Some long string']