I'm an idiot

[Kerim Borchaev]

Hello David,
 having noticed that every solution suggested writes extra eol at the
 end of resulting file i'd like to present my version with tests included.

#######################################
def strip_file(src, dst):
    f = open(dst, 'w')
    for line in open(src).readlines():
        eol = ''
        if line and line[-1]=='\n':
            eol = '\n'
        f.write(line.strip()+eol)

def test(src, expected):
    import tempfile

    f0 = tempfile.mktemp()
    f1 = tempfile.mktemp()

    open(f0, 'w').write(src)

    strip_file(f0, f1)

    res = open(f1).read()
    assert expected == res
    

test('hello\nworld', 'hello\nworld')
test('hello\nworld\n', 'hello\nworld\n')
test('  hello\n world', 'hello\nworld')
test('  hello  \nworld', 'hello\nworld')
test('  hello  world ', 'hello  world')
#######################################

Enjoy!

 Kerim                            mailto:warkid at storm.ru
 
Saturday, June 29, 2002, 5:00:22 AM, you wrote:

D> OK, I am the first to admit it.  I am an idiot.  I have RTFM on this over 
D> and over, and I can still not figure out what I am doing wrong.

D> I think the intent of the code is obvious, but just to clarify, I want to 
D> read every line in a file and write those lines back out to another file, 
D> but with leading and training space removed.  I also want to have some 
D> elegant way to determine that I have reached the end of the file and 
D> break out of the loop.

D> And just to explain my stupidity, my reference langauge is BASIC.  I 
D> could have written this in BASIC in a minute, but I need to learn 
D> something new.  Any help would be appreciated.

D> David


D> f=open('c:\\temp\\temp.txt', 'r')
D> g=open('c:\\temp\\temp1.txt', 'w')
D> while 1:
D>     try:
D>         s=f.readline
D>         g.write(s.split())
D>     except IOError:
D>         break

D> g.close
D> f.close