Member Avatar for mengqing

if i have a string e.g.

string = "Hello\nWorld"

and do
list = string.split()

'\n' would be ignored

how can I preserve '\n' when splitting strings..?

Thanks

  • 4 Contributors
  • 4 Replies
  • 114 Views
  • 1 Day Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by bvdet

Dani AI

Generated

Default split() drops whitespace (including newlines), as pointed out. 's paragraph-splitting idea is fine when paragraphs are separated by blank lines, and correctly noted that splitlines() preserves newlines. Below are a couple of practical, different approaches for loading text while keeping \n visible and some edge cases to watch.

A simple, common pattern is to read the file into a list of lines; the file iterator and readlines() keep trailing newline characters (except when the file's final line lacks one):

with open('myfile.txt', 'r') as f:
    lines = f.readlines()   # each element normally ends with '\n'

When splitting an in-memory string on a delimiter but wanting to keep the newline characters as tokens, use a regular expression that captures the separator. re.split will include captured groups in the result, so the \n strings are preserved and can be reattached if needed:

import re

parts = re.split(r'(\r?\n)', text)   # text and newline tokens interleaved
lines_with_newline = [parts[i] + parts[i+1] for i in range(0, len(parts)-1, 2)]

Notes and cautions: Windows CRLFs (\r\n) are handled by \r?\n or by Python's universal-newline handling; a file's last line may not end with \n, so checks for that are useful. For quick line-preserving behavior splitlines(True) (mentioned by ) is a handy one-liner; for more control over separators and grouping, the re.split approach is more flexible. See the Python docs for str.splitlines, re.split, and file-object methods for details and edge cases (splitlines, re.split, file methods).

Recommended Answers

All 4 Replies

Member Avatar for hacker9801

well split() by default removes all whitespace/newlines, so pass it a specific delimiter, i.e.

string = "Hello,\nWorld"
print string.split(",")
Member Avatar for mengqing

I see.

However, what I am trying to do is load a text file which contains a paragraph that I want to modify with.

how can I load it into a list so that '\n' are preserved?

Thanks..

Member Avatar for Ene Uran

If your paragraphs are properly separated, you could use something lke this:

text = """\
This is my
first paragraph.

This is my
second paragraph.

This is my
third paragraph.
"""

q = text.split('\n\n')

print q

"""
my output -->
['This is my\nfirst paragraph.',
'This is my\nsecond paragraph.',
'This is my\nthird paragraph.\n']
"""
Member Avatar for bvdet

The string method splitlines() can preserve trailing newlines.

>>> string.splitlines(1)
['Hello\n', 'World']
>>>
Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.