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Simple lexical analysis.</TITLE>
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<H1><A NAME="SECTION0071100000000000000000">
5.11 <tt class=module>shlex</tt> --
         Simple lexical analysis.</A>
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<P>


<P>
New in version 1.5.2.

<P>
The <tt class=class>shlex</tt> 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.

<P>
<dl><dt><b><a name="l2h-849"><tt class=class>shlex</tt></a></b> (<big>[</big><var>stream</var><big>]</big>)
<dd>
A <tt class=class>shlex</tt> 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
<tt class=method>read()</tt> and <tt class=method>readline()</tt> methods.  If no argument is given,
input will be taken from <tt>sys.stdin</tt>.

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