How to Efficiently Remove Newline Characters When Reading Files in Python?

Stripping Newline Characters from File Reads in Python

When using the readlines() method to read a file in Python, the resulting list of strings contains newline characters at the end of each element. To obtain the data without these newlines, several methods are available:

str.splitlines()

This method splits the entire file content into a list of strings, preserving the lines' original order without the newline characters.

temp = file.read().splitlines()

Manual Stripping

Individually removing the newline characters from each string in the list is another option.

temp = [line[:-1] for line in file]

Note: This approach assumes the file has a newline character at the end; otherwise, the last line will be truncated.

Enforcing Newline at End of File

If the file may not have a trailing newline, a newline can be manually added before reading the file.

with open(the_file, 'r+') as f:
    f.seek(-1, 2)  # Navigate to the file end
    if f.read(1) != '\n':
        f.write('\n')        # Insert newline if missing
        f.flush()
        f.seek(0)
    lines = [line[:-1] for line in f]

Other Alternative Stripping Methods

• [line.rstrip('n') for line in file]
• [line[:-(line[-1] == 'n') or len(line) 1] for line in file]

Remember that the readlines() method iterates through the file line by line, retaining the newlines. To ensure an exact copy of the file, use writelines() without adding newlines.

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