How to Split a String

[Grant Edwards]

On 2007-11-29, Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> wrote:

>> One solution:
>>
>> >>> s = '(a, b, "c", d, "e")'
>> >>> print [x.strip('" ') for x in s.strip('()').split(',')]
>> ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']
>
> That fails when a quoted string contains commas:
>
>>>> s = '(a, b, "c", d, "e,f,g")'
>>>> print [x.strip('" ') for x in s.strip('()').split(',')]
> ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g']
>
> I presume the correct result would be
>
> ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e,f,g']

You can get that result easily with the csv module:

>>> repr(ss)
'\'a,b,"c",d,"e,f,g"\''
>>> for row in csv.reader([ss],skipinitialspace=True):
...  print row
... 
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e,f,g']

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! I'm not available
                                  at               for comment..
                               visi.com