Question

I noticed when I execute this command:

comb = open ("out.txt", "r").readlines()[0]
print comb

It will print the first line in the out file and an empty line after it. Why do I have the empty line?

Answer 1

From the docs:

readline() reads a single line from the file; a newline character (\n) is left at the end of the string, and is only omitted on the last line of the file if the file doesn’t end in a newline.

You can use this instead:

open("out.txt", "r").read().splitlines()[0]