Dealing with \n delimiter when reading flies in Python

Question

Every time I read a text file using the following code in Python, each line (except the last) ends with the \n delimiter.

lines = open('the_file.txt').readlines()

Then, I'm forced to fix this using the following method:

for i in range(len(lines)):
    lines[i] = lines[i].replace('\n', '')

Is there a cleaner way to do this so that I don't have to use this hacky fix just to get rid of all of the \n instances?

Process the file line-by-line with `for line in file: process_line()` — dawg, Jan 22 '15 at 01:49
The answer you can find here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/544921/best-method-for-reading-newline-delimited-files-in-python-and-discarding-the-new — fishi0x01, Jan 22 '15 at 01:49
You can't assign the value of a `for` loop counter due to garbage collection. — Malik Brahimi, Jan 22 '15 at 01:51
This also doesn't close the opened file until the scope is exited. It's better to use a `with` block. — b4hand, Jan 22 '15 at 02:04

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 22 '15 at 01:48

1

Use a list comprehension:

lines = open('the_file.txt').readlines()
lines = [line.strip() for line in lines]

answered Jan 22 '15 at 01:48

Malik Brahimi

1

`strip` removes excess whitespace and newines from strings. – Malik Brahimi Jan 22 '15 at 01:52
`rstrip('\n')` would be more appropriate; with your code it will also strip any whitespace from the start of the line; which may not be desired. – Burhan Khalid Jan 22 '15 at 04:11
Perhaps, but in the context of removing newlines, it appears that Ryan would also want to remove whitespace. – Malik Brahimi Jan 22 '15 at 11:40

1 Answers1