remove the last character or the newline character?

[Tim Chase]

> In [1]: fileName = 'Perfect Setup.txt\n'
> In [2]: fileName = fileName[0:len(fileName)-1)]   # remove the '\n'
> character
> In [3]: fileName
> Out[3]: 'Perfect Setup.txt'
> 
> Question one:
> Does python provide any function that can remove the last character of
> a string?
> I don't know whether or not the method I used is efficient

You're close...

	fileName = fileName[0:-1]

which is the same as

	fileName = fileName[:-1]

which will lop off the last character.  Much nicer than most 
other languages I've used where you have to use the len() trick 
you're using.  Also, it's a common python idiom you'll see 
frequently.

> Question two:
> Does python provide any function that can remove the newline character
> from a string if it exists?

In a discussion on this very matter a while back, I think the 
final verdict was something like

	fileName = fileName.rstrip('\n')

which will strip off *all* the trailing newlines.  In most cases 
(such as "for line in file('foo.txt'):" code), there's only one 
to be stripped, so this works fine.

If you're ornary and want *only* the last '\n' lopped off, you'd 
have to test for it:

	if fileName[-1] == '\n': fileName = fileName[:-1]

There were caveats regarding "\n" vs. "\r\n" line endings, but if 
the file comes in in ascii mode (rather than binary mode), Python 
more or less smart enough to do the translation for you, leaving 
the above code to work in the majority of cases.

-tkc