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

Question

I have command line arguments in a string and I need to split it to feed to argparse.ArgumentParser.parse_args.

I see that the documentation uses string.split() plentifully. However in complex cases, this does not work, such as

--foo "spaces in brakets"  --bar escaped spaces

Is there a functionality to do that in python?

(A similar question for java was asked here).

Answer 1

This is what shlex.split was created for.