=?iso-8859-1?Q?Walter_D=F6rwald?= writes: > your version: "oofoo".strip("foo") => "" > my version: "oofoo".strip("foo") => "oo" It sounds like yours is more like Perl's chomp(), with an option about what to chomp off. Not a bad idea, not sure I'd ever use more than: line = line.chomp('\n') -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org> PythonLabs at Zope Corporation