cut off \n

[sismex01 at hebmex.com]

> From: Tom [mailto:llafba at gmx.net]
> Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 10:51 AM
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have to read data from a file to a list. Unfortunately most of the 
> data that I read into my little list ends with a linefeed \n.
> Right now I get rid of this by just cutting off the last 
> character. (a = > l[:-1]).
>

This is *almost* the correct way to do it :-)

>
> My problem is that sometimes the last line of the file has a \n and 
> sometimes not. With the method above I sometimes cut off parts of my 
> string. So it would be much nicer if I can find out if the data does 
> have a \n and then cut it off.
>

You could do somethint like:

    if line.endswith("\n"):
        line = line[:-1]

or, if trailing whitespace is not significant (you don't mention it),
you can also do something like:

    line = line.rstrip()

or, if leading whitespace is not significant either, you can also
trim all leading and trailing whitespace, thusly:

    line = line.strip()


> 
> This is probably a very common problem but I am pretty new to Phython 
> and could find anything useful with google. :-(
> 
> Thanks, Tom
>

Perl has yet-another-kinda-useful-function called "chomp", which
deletes a line ending from a string, only if it's found.  Alas,
python is chompless, not that I'm complaining, the above code
is what I use all the time.

-gca

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