As it stands, writelines is consistent with readlines. Both preserve
newlines.
indeed. so if this idea is to be done (and there's something to be said for it), I think a similar option should be added to readlines as well -- striping the newline.
A couple other notes:
This would highlight the whole "a string is an iterable of strings" problem :-( -- should strings be special cased? I think not, that's an issue that Python programmers have to learn at one point or another anyway.
As for whether it always puts in a newline, or if you can specify what you want to put in , I vote for the newline -- newlines are not the same on all platforms (though TextIO does translate), but I think it would get a bit confusing if someone explicitly put in "\n| and got "\r\n".
And the name IS writeLINES -- so why would anyone expect to use it for anything else -- we still have str.join() after all.
-CHB
--
Christopher Barker, PhD (Chris)
Python Language Consulting
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