Parsing a search string

[M.E.Farmer]

How ,
I just posted on something similar earlier ;)
Ok  first of all you might want to try shlex it is in the standard
library.
If you don't know what cStringIO is dont worry about it it is just to
give a file like object to pass to shlex.
If you have a file just pass it in opened.
example: a = shlex.shlex(open('mytxt.txt','r'))

py>import cStringIO
py>d = cStringIO.StringIO()
py>d.write('moo cow "farmer john" -zug')
py>d.seek(0)
py>a = shlex.shlex(d)
py>a.get_token()
'moo'
py>a.get_token()
'cow'
py>a.get_token()
'"farmer john"'
py>a.get_token()
'-'
py>a.get_token()
'zug'
py>a.get_token()
''
# ok we try again this time we add - to valid chars so we can get it
grouped as a single token .
py>d.seek(0)
py>a = shlex.shlex(d)
py>a.wordchars += '-' # add the hyphen
py>a.get_token()
'moo'
py>a.get_token()
'cow'
py>a.get_token()
'"farmer john"'
py>a.get_token()
'-zug'
py>a.get_token()
''

Hth,
M.E.Farmer