Question

I am reading in some data from the subprocess module’s communicate method. It is coming in as a large string separated by “\r\n”s. I want to split this into a list of lines. How is this performed in python?

Answer 1

Use the splitlines method on the string.

From the docs:

str.splitlines([keepends])
Return a list of the lines in the string, breaking at line boundaries.
Line breaks are not included in the
resulting list unless keepends is
given and true.

This will do the right thing whether the line endings are “\r\n”, “\r” or “\n” regardless of the OS.

NB a line ending of “\n\r” will also split, but you will get an empty string between each line since it will consider “\n” as a valid line ending and “\r” as the ending of the next line. e.g.

>>> "foo\n\rbar".splitlines()
['foo', '', 'bar']