row = (
    """172.16.0.3 - - [25/Sep/2002:14:04:19 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 401 - "" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020827" """
    )
import re
map(''.join, re.findall('\\"(.*?)\\"|\\[(.*?)\\]|(\\S+)', row))
Parsing apache log files