python find if newline is in string

Question

I am trying to find if a "\n" character is in a string using this:

if "\n" in errors.text

This works fine for a string like "one\ntwo" but when the newline is at the end of the string like "one\n", it doesn't seem to work. I am using selenium to get this string from a website. Is it possible that it is not catching the newline at the end and simply not including it?

Or could this be the problem?

fixedText = errors.text.split("\n")[0]

I want the fixed text to remove all newlines and only get the first line of text. It works except for the case discussed above

Solution

If you want the fixed text to only be the first line in a string, you can do this:

if errors.text: # skips empty strings
    fixedText = errors.text.split("\n")[0]

This is because split() is reasonably robust:

>>> 'a'.split()[0]
'a'
>>> 'a\n'.split()[0]
'a'
>>> 'a\n1'.split()[0]
'a'
>>> ''.split()
[]

That last example demonstrates why we check for an empty string before trying to index the resulting list.