String splitting with exceptions

[John Levine]

I have a crufty old DNS provisioning system that I'm rewriting and I
hope improving in python.  (It's based on tinydns if you know what
that is.)

The record formats are, in the worst case, like this:

foo.[DOM]::[IP6::4361:6368:6574]:600::

What I would like to do is to split this string into a list like this:

[ 'foo.[DOM]','','[IP6::4361:6368:6574]','600','' ]

Colons are separators except when they're inside square brackets.  I
have been messing around with re.split() and re.findall() and haven't
been able to come up with either a working separator pattern for
split() or a working field pattern for findall().  I came pretty
close with findall() but can't get it to reliably match the
nothing between two adjacent colons not inside brackets.

Any suggestions? I realize I could do it in a loop where I pick stuff
off the front of the string, but yuck.

This is in python 2.7.5.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly