line to argv transformation

[Antoon Pardon]

I am looking for an interface that takes a string as argument. The
string is to be treated as if it is a command line and transformed into
an argv list.

"ls file"   -> ['ls', 'file']
"ls *.py"   -> ['ls', 'file1.py', 'file2.py', ...]
"ls '*.py'" -> ['ls', '*.py']

Does something like this already exist? I looked around but seem to find
only things only partially do things like this, like shlex.split.

-- 
Antoon Pardon