super simple python program - substituting whitespaces with newlines?

Question

I am trying to write a program with python. I want to substitute whitespaces in a txt document with new lines. I have tried writing it myself but my output file gets filled with weird characters. Can you help? :)

Answer 1

Here you go:

lResults = list()
with open("text.txt", 'r') as oFile:
    for line in oFile:
        sNewLine = line.replace(" ", "\n")
        lResults.append(sNewLine)

with open("results.txt", "w") as oFile:
    for line in lResults:
        oFile.write(line)

Here an "optimized" version after the suggestions in the comments:

with open("text.txt", 'r') as oFile:
    lResults = [line.replace(" ", "\n") for line in oFile]

with open("results.txt", "w") as oFile:
    oFile.writelines(lResults)

EDIT: Response to comment:

hey sebastian - I just tried your code, it keeps giving me the weird characters in the output file! am i doing something wrong with it? – Freddy 1 min ago

What do you mean by "weird" characters? Do you have a non-ASCII file? Sorry, but for me it works perfectly fine, I just tested it.

Answer 2

Try this:

import re
s = 'the text to be processed'
re.sub(r'\s+', '\n', s)
=> 'the\ntext\nto\nbe\nprocessed'

Now, the "text to be processed" above will come from the input text file, that you previously read in a string - see this answer for details on how to do this.

Answer 3

You can achieve this with regular expressions:

import re

with open('thefile.txt') as f, open('out.txt', 'w') as out:
    for line in f:
        new_line = re.sub('\s', '\n', line)
        # print new_line
        out.write(new_line)

You probably need to write back new_line to a file instead of printing it :) (==> snippet edited).

---

See the python regex documentation:

sub(pattern, repl, string, count=0, flags=0)

• pattern: the search pattern
• repl: the replace pattern
• string: the string to be processed, in this case, line

Note: if you only want to substitute whitespaces which occur at the end of the line, use the \s$ search pattern, where $ stands for the end of the string (so that reads "a space at the end of the string"). If you really need to replace just every space, then the replace method of str is probably enough.

Answer 4

def (in_file, out_file):
  with open(in_file, 'r') as i, open(out_file, 'w') as o:
     w.write(i.read().replace(' ', os.linesep))

Notice that this neither loops nor writes '\n' but instead os.linesep which will be \n on Linuxes and \r\n on Windows and so on.

Also notice that the biggest part of the answer comes from alwaysprep and he should get the credit for it, if he takes the loop out of his solution. (Did he actually deleted his answer? Can't find it anymore.)