[Python-Dev] New string method - splitquoted

[Neal Norwitz]

On 5/17/06, Dave Cinege
<dcinege-mlists-dated-1148357217.fc23eb at psychosis.com> wrote:
> Very often....make that very very very very very very very very very often,
> I find myself processing text in python that  when .split()'ing a line, I'd
> like to exclude the split for a 'quoted' item...quoted because it contains
> whitespace or the sep char.
>
> For example:
>
> s = '      Chan: 11  SNR: 22  ESSID: "Spaced Out Wifi"  Enc: On'
>
> If I want to yank the essid in the above example, it's a pain. But with my new
> dandy split quoted method, we have a 3rd argument to .split() that we can
> spec the quote delimiter where no splitting will occur, and the quote char
> will be dropped:
>
>         s.split(None,-1,'"')[5]
>         'Spaced Out Wifi'
>
> Attached is a proof of concept patch against
> Python-2.4.1/Objects/stringobject.c  that implements this. It is limited to
> whitespace splitting only. (sep == None)
>
> As implemented the quote delimiter also doubles as an additional separator for
> the spliting out a substr.
>
> For example:
>         'There is"no whitespace before these"quotes'.split(None,-1,'"')
>         ['There', 'is', 'no whitespace before these', 'quotes']
>
> This is useful, but possibly better put into practice as a separate method??
>
> Comments please.

What's wrong with:  re.findall(r'"[^"]*"|[^"\s]+', s)

YMMV,
n