How can I remove a trailing newline?

Question

What is the Python equivalent of Perl\'s chomp function, which removes the last character of a string if it is a newline?

Answer 1

An example in Python's documentation simply uses line.strip().

Perl's chomp function removes one linebreak sequence from the end of a string only if it's actually there.

Here is how I plan to do that in Python, if process is conceptually the function that I need in order to do something useful to each line from this file:

import os
sep_pos = -len(os.linesep)
with open("file.txt") as f:
    for line in f:
        if line[sep_pos:] == os.linesep:
            line = line[:sep_pos]
        process(line)

Answer 2

I don't program in Python, but I came across an FAQ at python.org advocating S.rstrip("\r\n") for python 2.2 or later.

Answer 3

>>> '   spacious   '.rstrip()
'   spacious'
>>> "AABAA".rstrip("A")
  'AAB'
>>> "ABBA".rstrip("AB") # both AB and BA are stripped
   ''
>>> "ABCABBA".rstrip("AB")
   'ABC'

Answer 4

This would replicate exactly perl's chomp (minus behavior on arrays) for "\n" line terminator:

def chomp(x):
    if x.endswith("\r\n"): return x[:-2]
    if x.endswith("\n") or x.endswith("\r"): return x[:-1]
    return x

(Note: it does not modify string 'in place'; it does not strip extra trailing whitespace; takes \r\n in account)

Answer 5

workaround solution for special case:

if the newline character is the last character (as is the case with most file inputs), then for any element in the collection you can index as follows:

foobar= foobar[:-1]

to slice out your newline character.

Answer 6

A catch all:

line = line.rstrip('\r|\n')