please no backslashes, split lines using parens.. in above circumstance that'd look like:

   patterns = self.options.monitor_extras.replace(
                   ' ','').split(',')

Although I'm not sure that actually makes much sense.  It'd be better to use space as the delimiter then use shlex split:

```
import optparse
import sys
import shlex
parser = optparse.OptionParser()
parser.add_option('--mon', default=None)
options, args = parser.parse_args(sys.argv[1:])
print shlex.split(options.mon)
```
python foo.py --mon 'a.* *.b c.txt foo\ bar'
['a.*', '*.b', 'c.txt', 'foo bar']