Split string but ignore quotes

[Björn Lindqvist]

2009/9/29 Scooter <slbentley at gmail.com>:
> I'm attempting to reformat an apache log file that was written with a
> custom output format. I'm attempting to get it to w3c format using a
> python script. The problem I'm having is the field-to-field matching.
> In my python code I'm using split with spaces as my delimiter. But it
> fails when it reaches the user agent because that field itself
> contains spaces. But that user agent is enclosed with double quotes.
> So is there a way to split on a certain delimiter but not to split
> within quoted words.
>
> i.e. a line might look like
>
> 2009-09-29 12:00:00 - GET / "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0;
> Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC
> 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 3.5.21022)" http://somehost.com 200
> 1923 1360 31715 -

Try shlex:

>>> import shlex
>>> s = '2009-09-29 12:00:00 - GET / "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 3.5.21022)" http://somehost.com 200'
>>> shlex.split(s)
['2009-09-29', '12:00:00', '-', 'GET', '/', 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;
MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; GTB5; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media
Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506; .NET CLR 3.5.21022)',
'http://somehost.com', '200']





-- 
mvh Björn