[Tutor] Using string.strip()

[Koen]

Sheila King wrote:

>OK, I'm having another one of my dumb moments...
>
>
>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.
>
This is not a problem with the strip or split command.
the problem is in the for loop. see the following examples:

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

for item in range(len(responses)):
    responses[item] = responses[item].strip()


in the first example, second line, the variable /item /is in no way 
related with the list /responses/.
in the second example, you change the elements /in the list/ itself.
You should ALWAYS use this second method when altering contents of lists!!

Cheers, Koen