Parsing a search string

[Freddie]

Happy new year! Since I have run out of alcohol, I'll ask a question that I 
haven't really worked out an answer for yet. Is there an elegant way to turn 
something like:

 > moo cow "farmer john" -zug

into:

['moo', 'cow', 'farmer john'], ['zug']

I'm trying to parse a search string so I can use it for SQL WHERE constraints, 
preferably without horrifying regular expressions. Uhh yeah.

 From 2005,
   Freddie