The changes to shlex due to land in 3.6 use a predefined set of characters to "augment" wordchars, however this set is incomplete. For example, 'foo,bar' should be parsed as a single token, but it is split on the comma:

$ echo foo,bar
foo,bar

>>> import shlex
>>> list(shlex.shlex('foo,bar', punctuation_chars=True))
['foo', ',', 'bar']

(For context on where this was encountered, see https://github.com/kislyuk/argcomplete/issues/161)

Instead of trying to enumerate all possible wordchars, I think a more robust solution is to use whitespace_split to include *all* characters not otherwise considered special.

Ideally this would be fixed before 3.6 is released to avoid needing to maintain backwards compatibility with the current behaviour, although I understand the timeline may make this difficult.

I've attached a patch with proposed changes, including updates to the tests to demonstrate the effective difference. I can make the corresponding documentation changes if we want this merged.

(I've added everyone to the nosy list from http://bugs.python.org/issue1521950 where these changes originated.)