In Python 2.4, how can I strip out characters after ';'?

Question

Let\'s say I\'m parsing a file, which uses ; as the comment character. I don\'t want to parse comments. So if I a line looks like this:

example.com.         


        

Answer 1

Here is another way :

In [6]: line = "foo;bar"
In [7]: line[:line.find(";")] + "\n"
Out[7]: 'foo\n'

Answer 2

For Python 2.5 or greater, I would use the partition method:

rtr = line.partition(';')[0].rstrip() + '\n'

Answer 3

file = open(r'c:\temp\test.txt', 'r')
for line in file:   print
   line.split(";")[0].strip()

Answer 4

So you'll want to split the line on the first semicolon, take everything before it, strip off any lingering whitespace, and append a newline character.

rtr = line.split(";", 1)[0].rstrip() + '\n'

Links to Documentation:

• split
• rstrip

Answer 5

Reading, splitting, stripping, and joining lines with newline all in one line of python:

rtr = '\n'.join(line.split(';')[0].strip() for line in open(r'c:\temp\test.txt', 'r'))

Answer 6

I'd recommend saying

line.split(";")[0]

which will give you a string of all characters up to but not including the first ";" character. If no ";" character is present, then it will give you the entire line.