Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How it works...

shlex is a module originally created to parse Unix shell code. For that reason, it supports preserving phrases through quotes. Typically, in Unix command lines, words separated by spaces are provided as arguments to the called command, but if you want to provide multiple words as a single argument, you can use quotes to group them.

That's exactly what shlex reproduces, providing us with a reliable way to drive the splitting. We just need to wrap everything we want to preserve in double or single quotes.