# 5.11 `shlex` -- Simple lexical analysis

New in version 1.5.2.

The `shlex` class makes it easy to write lexical analyzers for simple syntaxes resembling that of the Unix shell. This will often be useful for writing minilanguages, e.g. in run control files for Python applications.

`shlex` ([stream[, file]])
  A `shlex` instance or subclass instance is a lexical analyzer object. The initialization argument, if present, specifies where to read characters from. It must be a file- or stream-like object with `read()` and `readline()` methods. If no argument is given, input will be taken from `sys.stdin`. The second optional argument is a filename string, which sets the initial value of the `infile` member. If the stream argument is omitted or equal to `sys.stdin`, this second argument defaults to ``stdin''.

See Also:

Module `ConfigParser`:
  Parser for configuration files similar to the Windows .ini files.

Subsections

- 5.11.1 shlex Objects