Removing \r\n from a Python list after importing with readlines

python readlines
Justin picture Justin · Jul 25, 2014 · Viewed 68.5k times · Source

I have saved a list of ticker symbols into a text file as follows:

MMM
ABT
ABBV
ANF
....

Then I use readlines to put the symbols into a Python list:

stocks = open(textfile).readlines()

However, when I look at the list in it contains Windows end-of-line delimiter which I do not want:

list: ['MMM\r\n', 'ABT\r\n', 'ABBV\r\n', 'ANF\r\n', 'ACE\r\n', 'ACN\r\n', 'ACT\r\n', 'ADBE\r\n', 'ADT\r\n', 'AMD\r\n', 'AES\r\n', .....

Can someone suggest the easiest way to remove these unwanted characters?

Answer

roippi picture roippi · Jul 25, 2014

That's basically how readlines works. You could post-process it:

stocks = [x.rstrip() for x in stocks]

But I prefer not using readlines at all if I don't want EOL character(s), instead doing:

stocks = open(textfile).read().splitlines()

Or even better:

with open(textfile) as f:
    stocks = f.read().splitlines()

(it almost certainly won't make a difference here, but using context managers to explicitly close file objects is a good habit to get into)

Related questions

How to read a file line-by-line into a list?

How do I read every line of a file in Python and store each line as an element in a list? I want to read the file line by line and append each line to the end of the list.

Read More
How to read a file without newlines?

In Python, calling temp = open(filename,'r').readlines() results in a list in which each element is a line in the file. It's a little stupid but still: readlines() also writes newline character to each element, something I do not …

Read More
Break string into list of characters in Python

Essentially I want to suck a line of text from a file, assign the characters to a list, and create a list of all the separate characters in a list -- a list of lists. At the moment, I've tried …

Read More