Remove all line breaks from a long string of text
PythonPython Problem Overview
Basically, I'm asking the user to input a string of text into the console, but the string is very long and includes many line breaks. How would I take the user's string and delete all line breaks to make it a single line of text. My method for acquiring the string is very simple.
string = raw_input("Please enter string: ")
Is there a different way I should be grabbing the string from the user? I'm running Python 2.7.4 on a Mac.
P.S. Clearly I'm a noob, so even if a solution isn't the most efficient, the one that uses the most simple syntax would be appreciated.
Python Solutions
Solution 1 - Python
How do you enter line breaks with raw_input
? But, once you have a string with some characters in it you want to get rid of, just replace
them.
>>> mystr = raw_input('please enter string: ')
please enter string: hello world, how do i enter line breaks?
>>> # pressing enter didn't work...
...
>>> mystr
'hello world, how do i enter line breaks?'
>>> mystr.replace(' ', '')
'helloworld,howdoienterlinebreaks?'
>>>
In the example above, I replaced all spaces. The string '\n'
represents newlines. And \r
represents carriage returns (if you're on windows, you might be getting these and a second replace
will handle them for you!).
basically:
# you probably want to use a space ' ' to replace `\n`
mystring = mystring.replace('\n', ' ').replace('\r', '')
Note also, that it is a bad idea to call your variable string
, as this shadows the module string
. Another name I'd avoid but would love to use sometimes: file
. For the same reason.
Solution 2 - Python
You can try using string replace:
string = string.replace('\r', '').replace('\n', '')
Solution 3 - Python
You can split the string with no separator arg, which will treat consecutive whitespace as a single separator (including newlines and tabs). Then join using a space:
In : " ".join("\n\nsome text \r\n with multiple whitespace".split())
Out: 'some text with multiple whitespace'
Solution 4 - Python
The canonic answer, in Python, would be :
s = ''.join(s.splitlines())
It splits the string into lines (letting Python doing it according to its own best practices). Then you merge it. Two possibilities here:
- replace the newline by a whitespace (
' '.join()
) - or without a whitespace (
''.join()
)
Solution 5 - Python
Solution 6 - Python
Another option is regex:
>>> import re
>>> re.sub("\n|\r", "", "Foo\n\rbar\n\rbaz\n\r")
'Foobarbaz'
Solution 7 - Python
If anybody decides to use replace
, you should try r'\n'
instead '\n'
mystring = mystring.replace(r'\n', ' ').replace(r'\r', '')
Solution 8 - Python
A method taking into consideration
- additional white characters at the beginning/end of string
- additional white characters at the beginning/end of every line
- various end-line characters
it takes such a multi-line string which may be messy e.g.
test_str = '\nhej ho \n aaa\r\n a\n '
and produces nice one-line string
>>> ' '.join([line.strip() for line in test_str.strip().splitlines()])
'hej ho aaa a'
UPDATE: To fix multiple new-line character producing redundant spaces:
' '.join([line.strip() for line in test_str.strip().splitlines() if line.strip()])
This works for the following too
test_str = '\nhej ho \n aaa\r\n\n\n\n\n a\n '
Solution 9 - Python
The problem with rstrip is that it does not work in all cases (as I myself have seen few). Instead you can use - text= text.replace("\n"," ") this will remove all new line \n with a space.
Thanks in advance guys for your upvotes.
Solution 10 - Python
Regular expressions is the fastest way to do this
s='''some kind of
string with a bunch\r of
extra spaces in it'''
re.sub(r'\s(?=\s)','',re.sub(r'\s',' ',s))
result:
'some kind of string with a bunch of extra spaces in it'
Solution 11 - Python
You can use
string= string.replace("\n", str())
However, sometimes it says
NoneType object has no attribute 'replace'
Thus, you shall be careful doing it. But thanks for asking about this
raw_ input !