split lines from stdin into a list of unicode strings

[Kurt Mueller]

This is a follow up to the Subject
"right adjusted strings containing umlauts"

For some text manipulation tasks I need a template to split lines
from stdin into a list of strings the way shlex.split() does it.
The encoding of the input can vary.
For further processing in Python I need the list of strings to be in unicode.

Here is template.py:

##############################################################################################################
#!/usr/bin/env python
# vim: set fileencoding=utf-8 :
# split lines from stdin into a list of unicode strings
# Muk 2013-08-23
# Python 2.7.3

from __future__ import print_function
import sys
import shlex
import chardet

bool_cmnt = True  # shlex: skip comments
bool_posx = True  # shlex: posix mode (strings in quotes)

for inpt_line in sys.stdin:
    print( 'inpt_line=' + repr( inpt_line ) )
    enco_type = chardet.detect( inpt_line )[ 'encoding' ]           # {'encoding': 'EUC-JP', 'confidence': 0.99}
    print( 'enco_type=' + repr( enco_type ) )
    try:
        strg_inpt = shlex.split( inpt_line, bool_cmnt, bool_posx, ) # shlex does not work on unicode
    except Exception, errr:                                         # usually 'No closing quotation'
        print( "error='%s' on inpt_line='%s'" % ( errr, inpt_line.rstrip(), ), file=sys.stderr, )
        continue
    print( 'strg_inpt=' + repr( strg_inpt ) )                       # list of strings
    strg_unic = [ strg.decode( enco_type ) for strg in strg_inpt ]  # decode the strings into unicode
    print( 'strg_unic=' + repr( strg_unic ) )                       # list of unicode strings
##############################################################################################################

$ cat <some-file> | template.py


Comments are welcome.


TIA
-- 
Kurt Mueller