slicing the end of a string in a list

[Paul Rubin]

John Salerno <johnjsal at NOSPAMgmail.com> writes:
> >   print [line[:-1] for line in open('C:\\switches.txt')]
> 
> Hmm, I just realized in my original code that I didn't escape the
> backslash. Why did it still work properly?

The character the backslash isn't special: \s doesn't get into
a code like \n, so the backslash is passed through.  Best not to
rely on that.

The preferred way to remove the newline is more like:
   for line in open('C:\\switches.txt'):
     print line.rstrip()

the rstrip method removes trailing whitespace, which might be \n
on some systems, \r\n on other systems, etc.

> And do I not need the 'r' parameter in the open function?

No you get 'r' by default.  If you want to write to the file you need
to pass the parameter.