Question

I have a code where I am reading all the lines from the file using readlines function and I am further parsing each line in a list. But when I printed the list I saw that the loop is ignoring the last line in the file. When I inserted a blank line in the file then all the contents are read. can you pls tell me why it is doing that

def readFile1(file1):
    f = file1.readlines()
    cList1 = []
    for line in f:
        if re.findall('\n',line):
            v = re.sub('\n','',line)
        cList1.append(v)

    print cList1

This is printing all the contents except the last line of the file.

Answer 1

If the last line doesn’t end with a newline, your code won’t add it to cList1. Instead, it would add a second copy of the penultimate line (which is still stored in v).

A cleaner way to write that loop is:

cList1 = []
for line in f:
    cList1.append(line.rstrip('\n'))

Or, indeed:

cList1 = [line.rstrip('\n') for line in f]

In fact, I would avoid the readlines() call entirely:

def readFile1(file1):
    cList1 = [line.rstrip('\n') for line in file1]
    print cList1