Newbie looking for feedback

[Jeremy Hylton]

David Lees <debl.spamnono at world.std.com> writes:

> Two questions.  First, I have written a real simple Python routine to
> remove blank lines from a text file.  The code below works but...
> 
> 1. I am sure this can be written much more simply, any hints?

> import string
> 
> fin=open("c:\\foo.txt","r")
> fout=open("c:\\barf.txt","w")
> s=""
> 
> while 1:
>     nextln=fin.readline()
>     
>     if len(nextln)==0 :
>         break
> 
>     if nextln[0] != '\n' :
>         fout.write(nextln)
> 
> fin.close()
> fout.close()

This program does exactly what your program does:

import fileinput
f = open("c:\\bar.txt", "w")
for line in fileinput.input("c:\\foo.txt"):
    if not line.startswith("\n"):
        f.write(line)
f.close()

If I could modify the behavior a bit, I would: (1) make it skip any
non-blank line that only has whitespace and (2) have it edit the file
in place. 

import fileinput
for line in fileinput.input("c:\\foo.txt", inplace=1):
    if line.strip():
        f.write(line)
f.close()

-- Jeremy Hylton <http://www.python.org/~jeremy/>