How to parse strings to look like sys.argv

python parsing argv
Gregg Lind picture Gregg Lind · May 22, 2009 · Viewed 17.8k times · Source

I would like to parse a string like this:

-o 1  --long "Some long string"

into this:

["-o", "1", "--long", 'Some long string']

or similar.

This is different than either getopt, or optparse, which start with sys.argv parsed input (like the output I have above). Is there a standard way to do this? Basically, this is "splitting" while keeping quoted strings together.

My best function so far:

import csv
def split_quote(string,quotechar='"'):
    '''

    >>> split_quote('--blah "Some argument" here')
    ['--blah', 'Some argument', 'here']

    >>> split_quote("--blah 'Some argument' here", quotechar="'")
    ['--blah', 'Some argument', 'here']
    '''
    s = csv.StringIO(string)
    C = csv.reader(s, delimiter=" ",quotechar=quotechar)
    return list(C)[0]

Answer

Jacob Gabrielson picture Jacob Gabrielson · May 22, 2009

I believe you want the shlex module.

>>> import shlex
>>> shlex.split('-o 1 --long "Some long string"')
['-o', '1', '--long', 'Some long string']

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