my input looks like this: 

```
 MSG1          .STRINGZ   “This is my sample string : "
 MEMORYSPACE   .BLKW      9
 NEWLINE       .FILL      #10
 NEG48         .FILl      #-48

      .END

```

right now i have a code that splits each line in my input file by word like such:

```
['MSG1', '.STRINGZ', '"This', 'is', 'a' , 'sample' , 'string','"']
['MEMORYSPACE', '.BLKW', '9']
['NEWLINE', '.FILL', '#10']
['NEG48', '.FILl', '#-48']
[]
['.END']

```

in the input file, on my first line where i have the string, i would like it to treat that whole string as one element so that i can count its length in my code. Is there any way of doing that? Here is my code: 

```
f = open ('testLC31.txt', 'r')
line_count = 0

to_ignore = ["AND", "ADD", "LEA", "PUTS", "JSR", "LD", "JSRR" , "NOT", "LDI" ,
            "LDR", "ST", "STI", "STR", "BR" , "JMP", "TRAP" , "JMP", "RTI" ,
            "BR", "ST", "STI" , "STR" , "BRz", "BRn" , "HALT"]

label = []
instructions = []

for line in f:
    elem = line.split() if line.split() else ['']
    if len(elem) > 1 and elem[0] not in to_ignore:
        label.append(elem[0])
        instructions.append(elem[1])
        line_count += 1
    elif elem[0] in to_ignore:
        line_count += 1

```