[Tutor] Using string.strip()

[Sheila King]

OK, I'm having another one of my dumb moments...

As I read the docs for the strip() function for strings, it removes all
leading and trailing characters that are defined in the
string.whitespace constant, correct? And I even looked in there and SAW
the '\n' character listed as a whitespace element.

Now, why isn't this working?

I have a file that contains something like this:

N
;;
no, cs student
;;
N
;;
no
;;
S
;;
case-sensitive
;;
Y
;;
yes
;;
N
;;
no
;;

I read it in as a string, let's call it messagebody
Then I do this:

responses = messagebody.split(';;')

Now, that will leave leading and trailing '\n' characters on the items
in the responses list, so I try this:

for item in responses:
    item = item.strip()

But when I run it and print out the results, I still have leading and
trailing '\n' characters on the individual list elements, as though the
strip() function had no effect.

I've tried a few other things, too, but none of them seem to be working,
either.

I thought that this was the whole purpose of the string.strip() command?

--
Sheila King
http://www.thinkspot.net/sheila/
http://www.k12groups.org/