Quote-aware string splitting

[Tim Heaney]

"J. W. McCall" <jmccall at houston.rr.com> writes:
>
> I need to split a string as per string.strip(), but with a
> modification: I want it to recognize quoted strings and return them as
> one list item, regardless of any whitespace within the quoted string.
>
> For example, given the string:
>
> 'spam "the life of brian" 42'
>
> I'd want it to return:
>
> ['spam', 'the life of brian', '42']
>
> I see no standard library function to do this, so what would be the
> most simple way to achieve this?  This should be simple, but I must be
> tired as I'm not currently able to think of an elegant way to do this.
>
> Any ideas?

How about the csv module? It seems like it might be overkill, but it
does already handle that sort of quoting

  >>> import csv
  >>> csv.reader(['spam "the life of brian" 42'], delimiter=' ').next()
  ['spam', 'the life of brian', '42']