A shlex instance has the following methods:
Normally, this method first strips any quotes off the argument. If
the result is an absolute pathname, or there was no previous source
request in effect, or the previous source was a stream
(e.g. sys.stdin
), the result is left alone. Otherwise, if the
result is a relative pathname, the directory part of the name of the
file immediately before it on the source inclusion stack is prepended
(this behavior is like the way the C preprocessor handles
#include "file.h"
). The result of the manipulations is treated
as a filename, and returned as the first component of the tuple, with
open() called on it to yield the second component.
This hook is exposed so that you can use it to implement directory search paths, addition of file extensions, and other namespace hacks. There is no corresponding `close' hook, but a shlex instance will call the close() method of the sourced input stream when it returns EOF.
This convenience is provided to encourage shlex users to generate error messages in the standard, parseable format understood by Emacs and other Unix tools.
Instances of shlex subclasses have some public instance variables which either control lexical analysis or can be used for debugging:
None
by default. If you assign a string to it,
that string will be recognized as a lexical-level inclusion request
similar to the "source" keyword in various shells. That is, the
immediately following token will opened as a filename and input taken
from that stream until EOF, at which point the close()
method of that stream will be called and the input source will again
become the original input stream. Source requests may be stacked any
number of levels deep.
1
or more, a shlex
instance will print verbose progress output on its behavior. If you
need to use this, you can read the module source code to learn the
details.
Note that any character not declared to be a word character, whitespace, or a quote will be returned as a single-character token.
Quote and comment characters are not recognized within words. Thus, the bare words "ain't" and "ain#t" would be returned as single tokens by the default parser.