help splitting strings

[Tony Case]

Hi all
	I'm pretty new to Python which probably explains my problems,
I'm trying to read data from a number of comma separated variable
files.  These are fairly large, 5000 lines plus.
	I'm reading the files and using split to separate the
individual values, some numeric some string.  The problem is that a
number of the lines have commas and double quotes embeded in the
strings so there are more elements in the list returned from split
than there should be, in one file there are 400 + lines like this so
it's not easy to edit the original file.
	Is there a programatic way of dealing with this?
The input files are in the form :-
int,int,int,"string","string",int,"string"
etc.
I tried using the re.findall and re.split but didn't get very far.
	TIA	T Case