Remove line breaks from txt file

Question

If I want to remove line breaks from a text file such as this:

hello

there

and I use a simple code like this:

with open('words.txt') as text:
  for line in text:
    print (line.strip())

It outputs this:

hello

there

However, I want my code to output this:

hello
there

How can I do this? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

add if line.strip() == '': continue before your print statement.

Answer 2

I see two ways to achieve what you want.

1. Reading line by line

   with open('bla.txt') as stream:
       for line in stream:
           # Empty lines will be ignored
           if line.strip():
               print(line)
   

2. Reading all contents

   import re
   with open('bla.txt') as stream:
       contents = stream.read()
       print re.sub('\s$', '', contents, flags=re.MULTILINE)
   

Answer 3

if its only linebreaks you want to remove, you could use string.replace("\n", "")

or if it only uses carraige returns instead of newlines (*nix) then string.replace("\r", "")

James

Answer 4

You need to test if a line is empty or not to solve this.

with open('words.txt') as text:
    for line in text:
        if line:
            print (line.strip())

In python empty-strings are falsy. That is, an if-test on an empty string will be considered false.