def shlex_split(s, **kwargs):
    '''
    Only split if variable is a string
    '''
    if isinstance(s, six.string_types):
        # On PY2, shlex.split will fail with unicode types if there are
        # non-ascii characters in the string. So, we need to make sure we
        # invoke it with a str type, and then decode the resulting string back
        # to unicode to return it.
        return salt.utils.data.decode(
            shlex.split(salt.utils.stringutils.to_str(s), **kwargs)
        )
    else:
        return s
Only split if variable is a string