[Tutor] Testing for empty line

[Danny Yoo]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Mike Yuen wrote:

> This is a simple question.  How do I test for an empty line when i'm
> reading in a file?

If you're reading the file, line by line, using readline() or readlines(),
then an "empty" line will only contain the newline character "\n".  You
can take advantage of this by using a comparison against this newline
string:

###
if line == '\n':
    print "This is an empty line."
###


However, be careful about what an "empty" line looks like --- a line
containing spaces wouldn't be considered empty by this comparison, so you
might need to do something more, like strip()ping out whitespace.  Here's
one possible definition that might help:

###
def isEmptyLine(line):
   if string.strip(line) == '':
       return 1
   return 0
###

If you have more questions, please feel free to ask!