Question

When reading lines from a text file using python, the end-line character often needs to be truncated before processing the text, as in the following example:

f = open('myFile.txt', 'r') for line in f:     line = line[:-1]     # do something with line 

Is there an elegant way or idiom for retrieving text lines without the end-line character?

Answer 1

The idiomatic way to do this in Python is to use rstrip(‘\n’):

for line in open('myfile.txt'):  # opened in text-mode; all EOLs are converted to '\n'     line = line.rstrip('\n')     process(line) 

Each of the other alternatives has a gotcha:

• file(‘…’).read().splitlines() has to load the whole file in memory at once.
• line = line[:-1] will fail if the last line has no EOL.