Is there a better/simpler way to filter blank lines?

[Chris Rebert]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 2:30 PM, tmallen <thomasmallen at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 4, 4:30 pm, bearophileH... at lycos.com wrote:
>> tmallen:
>>
>> > I'm parsing some text files, and I want to strip blank lines in the
>> > process. Is there a simpler way to do this than what I have here?
>> > lines = filter(lambda line: len(line.strip()) > 0, lines)
>>
>> xlines = (line for line in open(filename) if line.strip())
>>
>> Bye,
>> bearophile
>
> I must be missing something:
>
>>>> xlines = (line for line in open("new.data") if line.strip())
>>>> xlines
> <generator object at 0x6b648>
>>>> xlines.sort()
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> AttributeError: 'generator' object has no attribute 'sort'
>
> What do you think?

xlines is a generator, not a list. If you don't know what a generator
is, see the relevant parts of the Python tutorial/manual (Google is
your friend).
To sort the generator, you can use 'sorted(xlines)'
If you need it to actually be a list, you can do 'list(xlines)'

Cheers,
Chris
-- 
Follow the path of the Iguana...
http://rebertia.com

>
> Thomas
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