How to split a string into command line arguments like the shell in python?

You could use the split_arg_string helper function from the click package:

import re

def split_arg_string(string):
    """Given an argument string this attempts to split it into small parts."""
    rv = []
    for match in re.finditer(r"('([^'\\]*(?:\\.[^'\\]*)*)'"
                             r'|"([^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*)"'
                             r'|\S+)\s*', string, re.S):
        arg = match.group().strip()
        if arg[:1] == arg[-1:] and arg[:1] in '"\'':
            arg = arg[1:-1].encode('ascii', 'backslashreplace') \
                .decode('unicode-escape')
        try:
            arg = type(string)(arg)
        except UnicodeError:
            pass
        rv.append(arg)
    return rv

For example:

>>> print split_arg_string('"this is a test" 1 2 "1 \\" 2"')
['this is a test', '1', '2', '1 " 2']

The click package is starting to dominate for command-arguments parsing, but I don't think it supports parsing arguments from string (only from argv). The helper function above is used only for bash completion.

Edit: I can nothing but recommend to use the shlex.split() as suggested in the answer by @ShadowRanger. The only reason I'm not deleting this answer is because it provides a little bit faster splitting then the full-blown pure-python tokenizer used in shlex (around 3.5x faster for the example above, 5.9us vs 20.5us). However, this shouldn't be a reason to prefer it over shlex.

This is what shlex.split was created for.

If you're parsing a windows-style command line, then shlex.split doesn't work correctly - calling subprocess functions on the result will not have the same behavior as passing the string directly to the shell.

In that case, the most reliable way to split a string like the command-line arguments to python is... to pass command line arguments to python:

import sys
import subprocess
import shlex
import json  # json is an easy way to send arbitrary ascii-safe lists of strings out of python

def shell_split(cmd):
    """
    Like `shlex.split`, but uses the Windows splitting syntax when run on Windows.

    On windows, this is the inverse of subprocess.list2cmdline
    """
    if os.name == 'posix':
        return shlex.split(cmd)
    else:
        # TODO: write a version of this that doesn't invoke a subprocess
        if not cmd:
            return []
        full_cmd = '{} {}'.format(
            subprocess.list2cmdline([
                sys.executable, '-c',
                'import sys, json; print(json.dumps(sys.argv[1:]))'
            ]), cmd
        )
        ret = subprocess.check_output(full_cmd).decode()
        return json.loads(ret)

One example of how these differ:

# windows does not treat all backslashes as escapes
>>> shell_split(r'C:\Users\me\some_file.txt "file with spaces"', 'file with spaces')
['C:\\Users\\me\\some_file.txt', 'file with spaces']

# posix does
>>> shlex.split(r'C:\Users\me\some_file.txt "file with spaces"')
['C:Usersmesome_file.txt', 'file with spaces']

# non-posix does not mean Windows - this produces extra quotes
>>> shlex.split(r'C:\Users\me\some_file.txt "file with spaces"', posix=False)
['C:\\Users\\me\\some_file.txt', '"file with spaces"']