Question

I am parsing a big text file, and if I could only somehow read lines without the ‘\n’ symbol my life would be a lot easier. For example:

Hello
World

is returned by python’s readLines() as {'Hello\n','World\n'}, while I need to get {'Hello','World'}. Is there a way to only read printed chars?

I know it can be done using regex, but I hope there’s a more simple way to do it.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use the rstrip() function to eliminate trailing newlines. For your specific example:

In [9]: s = {'Hello\n','World\n'}

In [10]: s
Out[10]: set(['World\n', 'Hello\n'])


In [12]: for i in s:
   ....:     print i
World

Hello


In [13]: for i in s:
   ....:     print i.rstrip()

World
Hello

More information here: http://docs.python.org/library/string.html

You might consider getting rid of the newline as you read the file:

with open('data.txt') as infp:
   for line in infp:
       line = line.rstrip()
       # rest of processing