That's not bad going considering you've only run out of alcohol at 6 in the morning and *then* ask python questions.
Anyway - you could write a charcter-by-character parser function that would do that in a few minutes... My 'listquote' module has one - but it splits on commas not whitespace. Sounds like you're looking for a one-liner though.... regular expressions *could* do it............... Regards, Fuzzy http://www.voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html#llistquote -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list