Quote-aware string splitting

[J. W. McCall]

Hello,

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?

Thanks,

J. W. McCall