Removing \r\n from a Python list after importing with readlines

Question

I have saved a list of ticker symbols into a text file as follows:

MMM
ABT
ABBV
ANF
....

Then I use readlines to put the symbols into a Pyt

Answer 1

You could do it like this:

stocks = open(textfile).read().splitlines()

Answer 2

That's basically how readlines works. You could post-process it:

stocks = [x.rstrip() for x in stocks]

But I prefer not using readlines at all if I don't want EOL character(s), instead doing:

stocks = open(textfile).read().splitlines()

Or even better:

with open(textfile) as f:
    stocks = f.read().splitlines()

(it almost certainly won't make a difference here, but using context managers to explicitly close file objects is a good habit to get into)

Answer 3

You could replace \r\n with the empty string in a replace command.

stocks = [x.replace("\r\n","") for x in stocks]

Answer 4

readlines() should never be used unless you know that the file is really small. For your application, it is better to use rstrip()

with open(filename, 'r') as f:
    for l in f:
        l = l.rstrip()
        # other operations.