Handling lines with quotes using python's readline

Question

I've written a simple shell-like program that uses readline in order to provide smart completion of arguments. I would like the mechanism to support arguments that have spaces and are quoted to signify as one argument (as with providing the shell with such).

I've seen that shlex.split() knows how to parse quoted arguments, but in case a user wants to complete mid-typing it fails (for example: 'complete "Hello ' would cause an exception to be thrown when passed to shlex, because of unbalanced quotes).

Is there code for doing this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't know of any existing code for the task, but if I were to do this I'd catch the exception, try adding a fake trailing quote, and see how shlex.split does with the string thus modified.