I searched a bit on Stack Overflow and stumbled on different answers but nothing fitted for my situation...
I got a map.txt file like this:
+----------------------+
| |
| |
| |
| test |
| |
| |
| |
+------------------------------------------------+
| | |
| | |
| | |
| Science | Bibliothek |
| | |
| | |
| | |
+----------------------+-------------------------+
when I want to print it using this:
def display_map():
s = open("map.txt").read()
return s
print display_map()
it just prints me:
+----------------------+-------------------------+
When I try the same method with another text file like:
line 1
line 2
line 3
it works perfectly.
What I do wrong?
I guess this file uses the CR (Carriage Return) character (Ascii 13, or '\r') for newlines; on Windows and Linux this would just move the cursor back to column 1, but not move the cursor down to the beginning of a new line.
(Of course such line terminators would not survive copy-paste to Stack Overflow, which is why this cannot be replicated).
You can debug strange characters in a string with repr:
print(repr(read_map())
It will print out the string with all special characters escaped.
If you see \r in the repred string, you could try this instead:
def read_map():
with open('map.txt') as f: # with ensures the file is closed properly
return f.read().replace('\r', '\n') # replace \r with \n
Alternatively supply the U flag to open for universal newlines, which would convert '\r', '\r\n' and '\n' all to the \n upon reading despite the underlying operating system's conventions:
def read_map():
with open('map.txt', 'rU') as f:
return f.read()