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Why doesn't .rstrip('\n') work?

Let's say doc.txt contains

a
b
c
d

and that my code is

f = open('doc.txt')
doc = f.read()
doc = doc.rstrip('\n')
print doc

why do I get the same values?

Solution

  • str.rstrip() removes the trailing newline, not all the newlines in the middle. You have one long string, after all.

    Use str.splitlines() to split your document into lines without newlines; you can rejoin it if you want to:

    doclines = doc.splitlines()
doc_rejoined = ''.join(doclines)

    but now doc_rejoined will have all lines running together without a delimiter.