strip() 2.4.4

[Richie Hindle]

[Nick]
> Why is there a apostrophe still at the end?

[Stephen]
> Is it possible that you actually have whitespace at the end
> of the line?

It's the newline - reading lines from a file doesn't remove the newlines:

from cStringIO import StringIO

DATA = """\
'AF':'AFG':'004':'AFGHANISTAN':'Afghanistan'
'AL':'ALB':'008':'ALBANIA':'Albania'
'DZ':'DZA':'012':'ALGERIA':'Algeria'
'AS':'ASM':'016':'AMERICAN SAMOA':'American Samoa'
"""

f1 = StringIO(DATA)

for line in f1:
    print repr(line.rsplit(':')[4].strip("'")) # repr shows the error

# This prints:
# 
# "Afghanistan'\n"
# "Albania'\n"
# "Algeria'\n"
# "American Samoa'\n"
# 
# Do this instead:

f1.seek(0)

for line in f1:
    print line.strip().rsplit(':')[4].strip("'")

# This prints:
#
# Afghanistan
# Albania
# Algeria
# American Samoa

-- 
Richie Hindle
richie at entrian.com