I have a wordlist that contains returns to separate each new letter. Is there a way to programatically delete each of these returns using file I/O in Python?
Edit: I know how to manipulate strings to delete returns. I want to physically edit the file so that those returns are deleted.
I'm looking for something like this:
wfile = open("wordlist.txt", "r+") for line in wfile: if len(line) == 0: # note, the following is not real... this is what I'm aiming to achieve. wfile.delete(line) 7 Answers
>>> string = "testing\n" >>> string 'testing\n' >>> string = string[:-1] >>> string 'testing' This basically says "chop off the last thing in the string" The : is the "slice" operator. It would be a good idea to read up on how it works as it is very useful.
EDIT
I just read your updated question. I think I understand now. You have a file, like this:
aqua:test$ cat wordlist.txt Testing This Wordlist With Returns Between Lines and you want to get rid of the empty lines. Instead of modifying the file while you're reading from it, create a new file that you can write the non-empty lines from the old file into, like so:
# script rf = open("wordlist.txt") wf = open("newwordlist.txt","w") for line in rf: newline = line.rstrip('\r\n') wf.write(newline) wf.write('\n') # remove to leave out line breaks rf.close() wf.close() You should get:
aqua:test$ cat newwordlist.txt Testing This Wordlist With Returns Between Lines If you want something like
TestingThisWordlistWithReturnsBetweenLines just comment out
wf.write('\n') You can use a string's rstrip method to remove the newline characters from a string.
>>> 'something\n'.rstrip('\r\n') >>> 'something' The most efficient is to not specify a strip value
'\nsomething\n'.split() will strip all special characters and whitespace from the string
simply use, it solves the issue.
string.strip("\r\n") Remove empty lines in the file:
#!/usr/bin/env python import fileinput for line in fileinput.input("wordlist.txt", inplace=True): if line != '\n': print line, The file is moved to a backup file and standard output is directed to the input file.
'whatever\r\r\r\r\r\r\r\r\n\n\n\n\n'.translate(None, '\r\n') returns
'whatever' This is also a possible solution
file1 = open('myfile.txt','r') conv_file = open("numfile.txt","w") temp = file1.read().splitlines() for element in temp: conv_file.write(element) file1.close() conv_file.close() 
