So I've used [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2785755/how-to-split-but-ignore-separators-in-quoted-strings-in-python) answer to get really close to what i need.

In my case I want to split on space but not when a part of the string is within quotes.

This is my code:

```
data = '"abc dfg" ab da'    
PATTERN = re.compile(r'''((?:[^ "']|"[^"]*"|'[^']*')+)''')
wordList = PATTERN.split(data)[1::2]

```

Gives wordList:

```
['"abc dfg"', 'ab', 'da']

```

How can I change the expression so that the string is without the extra quotes?

Like this:

```
['abc dfg', 'ab', 'da']

```