split string at commas respecting quotes when string not in csv format

[R. David Murray]

Paul McGuire <ptmcg at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> On Mar 26, 2:51 pm, "R. David Murray" <rdmur... at bitdance.com> wrote:
> > OK, I've got a little problem that I'd like to ask the assembled minds
> > for help with.  I can write code to parse this, but I'm thinking it may
> > be possible to do it with regexes.  My regex foo isn't that good, so if
> > anyone is willing to help (or offer an alternate parsing suggestion)
> > I would be greatful.  (This has to be stdlib only, by the way, I
> > can't introduce any new modules into the application so pyparsing is
> > not an option.)
> 
> If you must cram all your code into a single source file, then
> pyparsing would be problematic.  But pyparsing's installation
> footprint is really quite small, just a single Python source file.  So
> if your program spans more than one file, just add pyparsing.py into
> the local directory along with everything else.

It isn't a matter of wanting to cram the code into a single source file.
I'm fixing a bug in a vendor-installed application.  A ten line locally
maintained patch is bad enough, installing a whole new external dependency
is just Not An Option :)

--
R. David Murray         http://www.bitdance.com