[Tutor] shlex.split if there is an apostrophe in the string?

[Steven D'Aprano]

Emile van Sebille wrote:
> On 1/7/2011 11:22 AM Sean Carolan said...
>> I'm practicing manipulating data with a text file.  I'm trying to use
>> shlex.split to break up each line,
> 
> Is there a reason not to use split directly?
> 
> for line in fin:
>   words = line.split()


shlex.split was specifically written to overcome a limitation of 
str.split, namely that str.split doesn't understand quoting:

 >>> text = "This includes some 'quoted text', as they call it."
 >>> text.split()
['This', 'includes', 'some', "'quoted", "text',", 'as', 'they', 'call', 
'it.']
 >>> shlex.split(text)
['This', 'includes', 'some', 'quoted text,', 'as', 'they', 'call', 'it.']

Although the functions have the same name, they do different things.


-- 
Steven