slicing the end of a string in a list

[John Salerno]

Here's the code I wrote:

file = open('C:\switches.txt', 'r')
switches = file.readlines()
i = 0

for line in switches:
	line = switches[i][:-1]
	i += 1
	
print switches


You can probably tell what I'm doing. Read a list of lines from a file, 
and then I want to slice off the '\n' character from each line. But 
after this code runs, the \n is still there. I thought it might have 
something to do with the fact that strings are immutable, but a test 
such as:

switches[0][:-1]

does slice off the \n character. So I guess the problem lies in the 
assignment or somewhere in there.

Also, is this the best way to index the list?