[Tutor] Re: perl's chomp equivalent?

[Wesley J. Chun]

    > Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 17:21:35 -0400 (EDT)
    > From: Tim Condit <timc@ans.net>
    > 
    > > Is there anything similar to perl's chomp, which removes newline
    > > characters from the end of a line? I'm using this, which works just fine
    > > if not..
    > > 
    > >     for i in range(len(merge_file)):
    > >         if merge_file[i][-1] == "\n":
    > >             print merge_file[i][:-1]
    > >         else:
    > >             print merge_file[i]


tim,

there are a variety of solutions for your question.  it all depends
on what your application is and how you want to approach it.  as
some folks have already mentioned, there are the *strip() routines:

- - -
import string

string.lstrip()		removes leading whitespace
string.rstrip()		removes trailing whitespace

or a combo of the two...

string.strip()		removes both leading and trailing whitespace
- - -

for i in range(len(merge_file)):
    print string.strip(merge_file[i])

... or ...

for i in merge_file:
    print string.strip(i)


also, as of Python 1.6/2.0, strings now have methods,
so you could do something like merge_file.rstrip(), etc.


finally, i noticed that the name of your variable has
the word "file" in it.  i don't know about your situation
but many times, i have to read in files with extra whitespace
and in these situations, i always seem to have to do some
kind of postprocessing on them.

i found it quite useful to use *strip() along with map()
in these cases.  rather than doing something like...

import string
f = open('foo.txt', 'r')
data = f.readlines()
f.close()

for eachLine in data:
    eachLine = string.strip(eachLine)

... i can save some code using map():

import string
f = open('foo.txt', 'r')
data = map(string.strip, f.readlines())
f.close()

hope this helps!!

-wesley

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

"Core Python Programming", Prentice Hall PTR, TBP Summer 2000
    http://www.phptr.com/ptrbooks/ptr_0130260363.html
    http://www.softpro.com/languages-python.html

wesley.j.chun :: wesc@alpha.ece.ucsb.edu
cyberweb.consulting :: silicon.valley, ca
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