How can I remove a trailing newline?
How can I remove a trailing newline?
Popular Answer
Try the method rstrip() (see doc Python 2 and Python 3)
>>> 'test string\n'.rstrip()
'test string'
Python's rstrip() method strips all kinds of trailing whitespace by default, not just one newline as Perl does with chomp.
>>> 'test string \n \r\n\n\r \n\n'.rstrip()
'test string'
To strip only newlines:
>>> 'test string \n \r\n\n\r \n\n'.rstrip('\n')
'test string \n \r\n\n\r '
There are also the methods lstrip() and strip():
>>> s = " \n\r\n \n abc def \n\r\n \n "
>>> s.strip()
'abc def'
>>> s.lstrip()
'abc def \n\r\n \n '
>>> s.rstrip()
' \n\r\n \n abc def'
Read more... Read less...
And I would say the "pythonic" way to get lines without trailing newline characters is splitlines().
>>> text = "line 1\nline 2\r\nline 3\nline 4"
>>> text.splitlines()
['line 1', 'line 2', 'line 3', 'line 4']
The canonical way to strip end-of-line (EOL) characters is to use the string rstrip() method removing any trailing \r or \n. Here are examples for Mac, Windows, and Unix EOL characters.
>>> 'Mac EOL\r'.rstrip('\r\n')
'Mac EOL'
>>> 'Windows EOL\r\n'.rstrip('\r\n')
'Windows EOL'
>>> 'Unix EOL\n'.rstrip('\r\n')
'Unix EOL'
Using '\r\n' as the parameter to rstrip means that it will strip out any trailing combination of '\r' or '\n'. That's why it works in all three cases above.
This nuance matters in rare cases. For example, I once had to process a text file which contained an HL7 message. The HL7 standard requires a trailing '\r' as its EOL character. The Windows machine on which I was using this message had appended its own '\r\n' EOL character. Therefore, the end of each line looked like '\r\r\n'. Using rstrip('\r\n') would have taken off the entire '\r\r\n' which is not what I wanted. In that case, I simply sliced off the last two characters instead.
Note that unlike Perl's chomp function, this will strip all specified characters at the end of the string, not just one:
>>> "Hello\n\n\n".rstrip("\n")
"Hello"
Note that rstrip doesn't act exactly like Perl's chomp() because it doesn't modify the string. That is, in Perl:
$x="a\n";
chomp $x
results in $x being "a".
but in Python:
x="a\n"
x.rstrip()
will mean that the value of x is still "a\n". Even x=x.rstrip() doesn't always give the same result, as it strips all whitespace from the end of the string, not just one newline at most.
I might use something like this:
import os
s = s.rstrip(os.linesep)
I think the problem with rstrip("\n") is that you'll probably want to make sure the line separator is portable. (some antiquated systems are rumored to use "\r\n"). The other gotcha is that rstrip will strip out repeated whitespace. Hopefully os.linesep will contain the right characters. the above works for me.
You may use line = line.rstrip('\n'). This will strip all newlines from the end of the string, not just one.