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pythonwindowstextnewlinefile-writing

Why does `write_text` appear to use CRLF and not LF?

Say, we are on Windows and we want to create a text file with the following content:

hello
world

We run

from pathlib import Path
Path('my.txt').write_text('hello\nworld')

and open the newly create my.txt in an editor. I was expecting it to show LF since we had \n in our string (as opposed to \r\n). To my surprise, my editor showed me that my.txt had CRLF.

Why did it happen? Is there a way to use write_text to write LF?

Solution

  • Python 3.10 (2021-10-04) now supports the newline argument. So now you can do:

    Path('my.txt').write_text('hello\nworld', newline='\n')

    Reference:

    Path.write_text(data, encoding=None, errors=None, newline=None)

    https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html#pathlib.Path.write_text

    Additional reference:

    https://bugs.python.org/issue23706