Question

I’ve got a Python script that prints out a file to the shell:

print open(lPath).read()

If I pass in the path to a file with the following contents (no brackets, they’re just here so newlines are visible):

> One
> Two
> 

I get the following output:

> One
> Two
> 
> 

Where’s that extra newline coming from? I’m running the script with bash on an Ubuntu system.

Answer 1

Use

print open(lPath).read(),  # notice the comma at the end.

print adds a newline. If you end the print statement with a comma, it’ll add a space instead.

You can use

import sys
sys.stdout.write(open(lPath).read())

If you don’t need any of the special features of print.

If you switch to Python 3, or use from __future__ import print_function on Python 2.6+, you can use the end argument to stop the print function from adding a newline.

print(open(lPath).read(), end='')