NEWLINE character problem

[Nuff Said]

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 16:16:12 +0200, Dragos Chirila wrote:

> I have a string and I want to split it by NEWLINE character.
> 
> It is knowned that "Microsoft Windows, Apple's Macintosh OS and various
> UNIX, all use different characters to mark the ends of lines in text files.
> Unix uses the linefeed (ASCII character 10), MacOS uses the carriage return
> (ASCII character 13), and Windows uses a two-character sequence of a
> carriage return plus a newline". So, PLEASE don't tell me to use 'split' by
> '\n' because it won't work.
> 
> I know about the Python support, opening files with 'U' flag, for reading in
> universal newline mode. But this is not the case. My script receives a
> string, can be the content of a file text from Windows or Unix system. I
> want to make sure that I can split this string by NEWLINE character.

Say your string is s; then you could use the following 
function (untested!) to make sure that s uses \n only: 

    def fix_lineendings(txt):
        if txt.count('\r\n'):  # MS DOS
            txt = txt.replace('\r\n', '\n')
        elif txt.count('\r'):  # Mac
            txt = txt.replace('\r', '\n')
        
        return txt

Simply write: s = fix_lineendings(s)

HTH / Nuff