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IT, Programming, & Web Development › Forums › CS50’s Introduction to Computer Science by Harvard University on Edx › Week 6: Python › CS105: Introduction to Python by Saylor Academy › Unit 4: Data Structures I – Lists and Strings › Newline characters in file handling: How and why to strip them in Python
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When reading lines from a file, each line typically ends with a newline character (\n
). These newline characters signal the end of a line and are automatically added when you write to a file or when pressing “Enter” in a text editor. If you don’t remove them, they will remain in your string when reading from the file.
Suppose your file example.txt
contains the following text:
Hello
World
Python
When you read the file line by line using file.readlines()
, each line will include the newline character at the end, like this:
with open('example.txt') as f:
lines = f.readlines()
print(lines)
Output:
['Hello\n', 'World\n', 'Python\n']
By using .strip()
, you remove the newline character (and any leading or trailing whitespace) from each line.
with open('example.txt') as f:
lines = [line.strip() for line in f]
Output:
['Hello', 'World', 'Python']
Removing newline characters can be essential when you want to work with “clean” data without unnecessary characters that might affect further processing, such as comparisons, concatenations, or printing.