Question

In a text file I’m trying to replace, I’m trying to delete an extra line break ie. convert

test="
123"

to

test="123"

What I currently have is:

f = open("file.txt")
o = open("newfile.txt","w")
while 1:
  line = f.readline()
  if not line: break
  line = line.replace('test="\r','test="')
  o.write(line)
o.close()

The problem is that it returns

  test="123"

with an invisible character between the <“> and the <123>. Is there some better alternative to what I’m currently doing? I’m not very proficient with python; thanks!

Answer 1

Your code have some flaws:

• f is not closed at the end
• you only replace \r, ignoring the \n on windows – this is your “invisible” character I think (windows uses \r\n as a linebreak in textfiles, linux \n and Mac \r)

here is another version (might be close to that what you want;) ):

with file("file.txt", "r") as f:
    with file("newfile.txt", "w") as o:
        o.write("".join(s.replace("\r", "").replace("\n","") 
                for s in f.readlines()))