Newbie looking for feedback

[David Lees]

Thanks for the help and suggestions on this one.  Time to go learn how
to use "for" and the debugger.

David Lees


Jeremy Hylton wrote:
> 
> 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/>