Python . How to get rid of '\r' in string?

Question

I have an excel file that I converted to a text file with a list of numbers.

test = 'filelocation.txt'

in_file = open(test,'r')

for line in in_file:
    print line

1.026106236
1.660274766
2.686381002
4.346655769
7.033036771
1.137969254

a = []

for line in in_file:
    a.append(line)
print a

'1.026106236\r1.660274766\r2.686381002\r4.346655769\r7.033036771\r1.137969254'

I wanted to assign each value (in each line) to an individual element in the list. Instead it is creating one element separated by \r . i'm not sure what \r is but why is putting these into the code ?

I think I know a way to get rid of the \r from the string but i want to fix the problem from the source

Solution 1

To accepts any of \r, \n, \r\n as a newline you could use 'U' (universal newline) file mode:

>>> open('test_newlines.txt', 'rb').read()
'a\rb\nc\r\nd'
>>> list(open('test_newlines.txt'))
['a\rb\n', 'c\r\n', 'd']
>>> list(open('test_newlines.txt', 'U'))
['a\n', 'b\n', 'c\n', 'd']
>>> open('test_newlines.txt').readlines()
['a\rb\n', 'c\r\n', 'd']
>>> open('test_newlines.txt', 'U').readlines()
['a\n', 'b\n', 'c\n', 'd']
>>> open('test_newlines.txt').read().split()
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']

If you want to get a numeric (float) array from the file; see Reading file string into an array (In a pythonic way)

Solution 2

use rstrip() or rstrip('\r') if you're sure than the last character is always \r.

for line in in_file:
    print line.rstrip()

help on str.rstrip():

S.rstrip([chars]) -> string or unicode

Return a copy of the string S with trailing whitespace removed.
If chars is given and not None, remove characters in chars instead.
If chars is unicode, S will be converted to unicode before stripping

str.strip() removes both trailing and leading whitespaces.

Comments

[jfs]

note: .rstrip() won't help because for line in in_file doesn't recognize \r as a newline on the OPs machine so line may contain multiple \r inside, try: '1\r2\r'.rstrip()