Question

I have a program which tries to use the output of another script to decide what to do.

I take in the stdout of a Python process from an SSH session, the output of which is either "Verified" or "Unverified", which appears on the command line when I print it as ['Verified\n'].

My code is below. First I read in the output, then print it, then try to compare it. However it always comes out as the second option, that a does not equal verified – even when it should. Perhaps there is something I am missing about stdout, but I have tried many variations of the (if a == ) condition, including with the brackets I listed above. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work at all.

stdin, stdout, stderr = ssh.exec_command("python verify.py")

a = stdout.readlines()
print a

if (a == "Verified"):
    print ("a does equal verified")
else:
    print ("a does not equal verified")

Answer 1

readlines() returns a list and as you pointed out it returns with the \n

Have you tried this?:

if(len(a) and a[0] == "Verified\n"):
  # verfiied, do your stuff here