Question

I am working on a simple import routine that translates a text file to a json file format for our system in python.

import json

# Open text file for reading
txtFile = open('Boating.Make.txt', 'r')

# Create picklist obj
picklistObj = dict()
picklistObj['name'] = 'Boating.Make'
picklistObj['items'] = list()

i = 0
# Iterate through each make in text file
for line in txtFile:
    picklistItemObj = dict()
    picklistItemObj['value'] = str(i)
    picklistItemObj['text'] = line.strip()
    picklistItemObj['selectable'] = True
    picklistObj['items'].append(picklistItemObj)
    i = i + 1
txtFile.close()

picklistJson = json.dumps(picklistObj, indent=4)
print picklistJson

picklistFile = open('Boating.Make.json', 'w')
picklistFile.write(picklistJson)
picklistFile.close()

My question is, why do I need the “strip”? I thought that python was supposed to magically know the newline constant for whatever environment I am currently in. Am I missing something?

I should clarify that the text file I am reading from is an ASCII file that contains lines of text separated ‘\r\n’.

Answer 1

Python keeps the new line characters while enumerating lines. For example, when enumerating a text file such as

foo
bar

you get two strings: "foo\n" and "bar\n". If you don’t want the terminal new line characters, you call strip().

I am not a fan of this behavior by the way.