Newby: how to transform text into lines of text

[John Machin]

On Jan 26, 1:03 pm, "Gabriel Genellina" <gagsl-... at yahoo.com.ar>
wrote:
> En Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:30:33 -0200, Tim Chase  
> <python.l... at tim.thechases.com> escribió:
>
>
>
> > Unfortunately, a raw rstrip() eats other whitespace that may be  
> > important.  I frequently get tab-delimited files, using the following  
> > pseudo-code:
>
> >    def clean_line(line):
> >      return line.rstrip('\r\n').split('\t')
>
> >    f = file('customer_x.txt')
> >    headers = clean_line(f.next())
> >    for line in f:
> >      field1, field2, field3 = clean_line(line)
> >      do_stuff()
>
> > if field3 is empty in the source-file, using rstrip(None) as you suggest  
> > triggers errors on the tuple assignment because it eats the tab that  
> > defined it.
>
> > I suppose if I were really smart, I'd dig a little deeper in the CSV  
> > module to sniff out the "right" way to parse tab-delimited files.
>
> It's so easy that don't doing that is just inexcusable lazyness :)
> Your own example, written using the csv module:
>
> import csv
>
> f = csv.reader(open('customer_x.txt','rb'), delimiter='\t')
> headers = f.next()
> for line in f:
>      field1, field2, field3 = line
>      do_stuff()
>

And where in all of that do you recommend that .decode(some_encoding)
be inserted?