strip() 2.4.4

[Peter Otten]

Nick wrote:

> strip() isn't working as i expect, am i doing something wrong -
> 
> Sample data in file in.txt:
> 
> 'AF':'AFG':'004':'AFGHANISTAN':'Afghanistan'
> 'AL':'ALB':'008':'ALBANIA':'Albania'
> 'DZ':'DZA':'012':'ALGERIA':'Algeria'
> 'AS':'ASM':'016':'AMERICAN SAMOA':'American Samoa'
> 
> 
> Code:
> 
> f1 = open('in.txt', 'r')
> 
> for line in f1:
>     print line.rsplit(':')[4].strip("'"),
> 
> Output:
> 
> Afghanistan'
> Albania'
> Algeria'
> American Samoa'
> 
> Why is there a apostrophe still at the end?

As others have already guessed, the problem is trailing whitespace, namely
the newline that you should have stripped

for line in f1:
    line = line.rstrip("\n")
    print line.rsplit(":", 1)[-1].strip("'")

instead of suppressing it with the trailing comma in the print statement.
Here is another approach that might work:

import csv
for row in csv.reader(f1, delimiter=":", quotechar="'"):
    print row[-1]

that should work, too.

Peter