Split list by comma in python unless surrounded by quotes in python

Question

If I have a string that I want to split where the commas are, how can I exclude any substring surrounded by quotes?

Ex.

Input: 'a,b,3,"d,e",f,"e,xam,p,le,"]

Output: ['a', 'b', '3', 'd,e', 'f', 'e,xam,p,le,']

using .split(',') doesn't work because it doesn't exclude items in the quotes, and I'm not sure how I would use re.split() since there can be anything inside of the quotes. There is no set length of the substring or location where a comma could be. I'm asking to try to avoid unnecessary for loops if possible!

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can take advantage of the csv module for parsing your data. As you have a string and not a file, you can use io.StringIO to obtain a file-like object.

The code would simply be:

import csv
from io import StringIO


reader = csv.reader(StringIO('a,b,3,"d,e",f,"e,xam,p,le,"'))
out = next(reader)

print(out)
# ['a', 'b', '3', 'd,e', 'f', 'e,xam,p,le,']