Optional argument for string.strip() (Was: [Python-Dev] Small fea ture request)

[Simon Brunning]

>From:	aahz at rahul.net [SMTP:aahz at rahul.net]
>Simon Brunning wrote:
>> 
>> This comes up on c.l.py occasionally, though - "What is Python's
equivalent
>> of Perl's 'chomp' function?" The .rstrip() method isn't it, 'cos it
strips
>> all whitespace, but often people want only the line separators removed.
if
>> rstrip took an argument, you could do:

>Ah.  Yes, that one.  I think that ought to be better fixed with an
>actual chomp() function, but the argument against it has always been
>that there's no good way to do it in the face of files from other
>platforms....  You wanna talk about that one, we might be able to have a
>productive discussion on c.l.py.

Will do...

To recap:

The .split method on strings splits at whitespace by default, but takes an
optional argument allowing splitting by other strings. The .strip method
(and its siblings) always strip whitespace - on more than one occasion I
would have found it useful if these methods also took an optional argument
allowing other strings to be stripped. For example, to strip, say, asterisks
from a string you could do:

>>>fred = '**word**word**'
>>>fred.strip('*')
word**word

As I mentioned, this would give us an equivalent to Perl's 'chomp'. Does
this sound sensible/useful?

BTW, my spell checker suggests that 'Perl' should be spelt 'Peril'. Smarter
than I thought.

Cheers,
Simon Brunning.





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