How to divide string like this into items in Python

Question

Here is the string:

format db "this is string a", 0, 0Ah

And I am trying to split it into this:

format
db
"this is string a"
0
0Ah

Is there any way can do this in python 2.7?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Use shlex.split:

s = 'format db "this is string a", 0, 0Ah'

import shlex

shlex.split(s)
Out[18]: ['format', 'db', 'this is string a,', '0,', '0Ah']

Your grammar is a little wonky with the trailing commas, but you can pretty safely rstrip that out:

[x.rstrip(',') for x in shlex.split(s)]
Out[20]: ['format', 'db', 'this is string a', '0', '0Ah']