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perl chomp equivalent in python?

Justin Sheehy dworkin at ccs.neu.edu
Thu Feb 10 16:31:26 EST 2000 
Jeff Bauer <jbauer at rubic.com> writes:

> Justin Sheehy wrote:
> <snip>
> > The need for this is also somewhat doubtful.  I have yet 
> > to see a real (not contrived) example where string.rstrip() 
> > wasn't the right choice for this sort of thing.
> 
> In most cases trailing whitespace is probably insignificant,
> but it would be best not to assume this for all circumstances 
> (e.g. tab-delimited files).

If you really feel the need to be more careful, you could do
something like:

(untested)*

import os
lines = open(file).readlines()
for line in lines:
    if line[-len(os.linesep):] == os.linesep:
            line = line[:-len(os.linesep)]
    print line

However, in comparison to the original solution of stripping
a number of characters off without even checking what they are,
string.rstrip() is definitely preferable.

As I said before, in every real case I've seen for this sort of thing,
string.rstrip() was the Right Thing to do.

> I would not want to see string.rstrip() used in library
> modules, since it could result in a loss of data where the
> user might not be expecting whitespace to disappear.  

That's silly.  It should be used in any library module where its
behavior (stripping all whitespace from the end of a string) is
desired.  In any case where that is not desired, of course it
shouldn't be used.  It's just a matter of knowing what your intentions 
and specifications are.

> Of all newgroups, certainly comp.lang.python would be 
> sympathetic to this issue. ;-)

Last time I checked, Python wasn't sensitive to extra whitespace at
the _end_ of a line.

-Justin

* - Also, I have no idea about the behavior of such things on
    non-UNIX-like operating systems.  YMMV.
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