[Python-Dev] New string method - splitquoted

[Heiko Wundram]

Am Donnerstag 18 Mai 2006 10:21 schrieb Giovanni Bajo:
> Heiko Wundram <me+python-dev at modelnine.org> wrote:
> > Don't get me wrong, I personally find this functionality very, very
> > interesting (I'm +0.5 on adding it in some way or another),
> > especially as a
> > part of the standard library (not necessarily as an extension to
> > .split()).
>
> It's already there. It's called shlex.split(), and follows the semantic of
> a standard UNIX shell, including escaping and other things.

I knew about *nix shell escaping, but that isn't necessarily what I find in 
input I have to process (although generally it's what you see, yeah). That's 
why I said that it would be interesting to have a generalized method, sort of 
like the csv module but only for string "interpretation", which takes a 
dialect, and parses a string for the specified dialect.

Remember, there also escaping by doubling the end of string marker (for 
example, '""this is not a single argument""'.split() should be parsed as 
['"this','is','not','a',....]), and I know programs that use exactly this 
format for file storage.

Maybe, one could simply export the function the csv module uses to parse the 
actual data fields as a more prominent method, which accepts keyword 
arguments, instead of a Dialect-derived class.

--- Heiko.