What would be a good way to deal with backslash escaped characters?

I have a string in the following format;

s="part1,part2,part3,part4"

I can split the string into pieces by just invoking the s.split(",") command.

Now, the question is what if I have a backslash escaped comma in the string? Assuming I have the following string,

s="part1,part2,pa\\,rt3,part4"

I'd like to be able to get ["part1","part2","pa,rt3","part4"] as the result.

What I initially thought was to replace the \, with a non-existent string, then split the string by using the split command and replace the non-existent string with a comm开发者_开发问答a.

Can you think of a better way to deal with this problem?

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Replacing it with a non-existing string is a nice option.

And otherwise, you could use a regular expression with a negative lookbehind like this:

re.split(r'(?<!\\),', 'part1,part2,pa\\,rt3,part4')

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The csv module can handle this as well:

import csv
from io import StringIO

s = 'part1,part2,pa\\,rt3,part4'
f = StringIO(s)

r = csv.reader(f,quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE,escapechar='\\')
for row in r:
    print row

Output

['part1', 'part2', 'pa,rt3', 'part4']

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BTW, '\' is not an escape character for ',' comma. So your string would have have a legal word with '\'. If you specially want the \, to be part of the word, then a regex based solutions looks good to me.