String splitting by spaces question

[Nick Dokos]

Alemu Tadesse <atadesse at sunedison.com> wrote:

> Can we use rsplit function on an array or vector of strings ? it works
> for one not for vector

> ...
> 
> I have to parse a string and splitting it by spaces. The problem is
> that the string can include substrings comprises by quotations which
> must mantain the spaces. What I need is to pass from a string like:
> 
> This is an 'example string'
> 
> to the following vector:
> 
> ["This", "is", "an", "example string"]
> 
> Which is the best way to achieve this?
> Thanks in advance!

You can use a list comprehension:

l2 = [x.rsplit(...) for x in l]

But for the original question, maybe the csv module would be
more useful: you can change delimiters and quotechars to match
your input:

    import csv
    reader = csv.reader(open("foo.txt", "rb"), delimiter=' ', quotechar="'")
    for row in reader:
        print row

Nick