I do agree that it is a crazy format - and am amazed that it works at the prompt.
For the first case - you have a mismatched double quote for test2 at the end of the string. test2 should be r'c:\A"\B;C"\D;c:\program files\xyz' instead. For the 2nd case - my code swallowed the ';' it split on - so I need a acc.append (';') just before the acc.append(p) in Accumulate. The code then works. It needs to be fixed to take care of extra double quotes and also a missing one (cmd.exe appeats to assume one at the end if it did not find one.) The itertools.splitby idea sounds really cool. I did not feel like writing a state machine as the state was so simple to maintain here - but I'd like to write a splitby so that it makes it easier to do such crazy splitting in general. Chirayu. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list