shlex – Tarik Billa

What is the difference between shlex.split() and re.split()?

August 22, 2023 by Tarik

shlex.split() is designed to work like the shell’s split mechanism. This means doing things like respecting quotes, etc. >>> shlex.split(“this is ‘my string’ that –has=arguments -or=something”) [‘this’, ‘is’, ‘my string’, ‘that’, ‘–has=arguments’, ‘-or=something’] re.split() will just split on whatever pattern you define. >>> re.split(‘\s’, “this is ‘my string’ that –has=arguments -or=something”) [‘this’, ‘is’, “‘my”, “string'”, … Read more

What’s the reverse of shlex.split?

June 7, 2023 by Tarik

We now (3.3) have a shlex.quote function. It’s none other that pipes.quote moved and documented (code using pipes.quote will still work). See http://bugs.python.org/issue9723 for the whole discussion. subprocess.list2cmdline is a private function that should not be used. It could however be moved to shlex and made officially public. See also http://bugs.python.org/issue1724822.