Replace \n with <br />

Question

I'm parsing text from file with Python. I have to replace all newlines (\n) with
cause this text will build html-content. For example, here is some line from file:

'title\n'

Now I do:

thatLine.replace('\n', '<br />')
print thatLine

And I still see the text with newline after it.

Solution 1

Just for kicks, you could also do

mytext = "<br />".join(mytext.split("\n"))

to replace all newlines in a string with <br />.

Solution 2

thatLine = thatLine.replace('\n', '<br />')

str.replace() returns a copy of the string, it doesn't modify the string you pass in.

Solution 3

For some reason using python3 I had to escape the "\"-sign

somestring.replace('\\n', '')

Hope this helps someone else!

Solution 4

To handle many newline delimiters, including character combinations like \r\n, use splitlines (see this related post) use the following:

'<br />'.join(thatLine.splitlines())

Solution 5

thatLine = thatLine.replace('\n', '<br />')

Strings in Python are immutable. You might need to recreate it with the assignment operator.

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Comments

[Tim Pietzcker]

Thanks for accepting this, but please accept @Falmarri's answer instead. It's much more Pythonic. This here is more of a funny, backwards way of doing it. Not really recommended...

[martineau]

Don't know about @Falmarri's answer being "more Pythonic", but it's more efficient and probably faster.

[Tim Pietzcker]

@martineau: I meant this in the sense of "There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it.". And I'm pretty sure that mine isn't the one.

[Cecil Curry]

Welcome to StackOverflow.

[JJFord3]

Would give +2. 5 stars!

[Jordan]

If you use double quotes around the \n, you would not have to escape it.

[Bendemann]

You might still need to escape it even if using double quotes