Python get proper line ending
Question:
Is there an easy way to get the type of line ending that the current operating system uses?
Answers:
Oh, I figured it out. Apparently, PEP-278 states the following:
Any line ending in the input file will be seen as a ‘n’ in Python, so little other code has to change to handle universal newlines.
If you are operating on a file that you opened in text mode, then you are correct that line breaks all show up as ‘n‘. Otherwise, you are looking for os.linesep .
From http://docs.python.org/library/os.html:
os.linesep
The string used to separate (or, rather, terminate) lines on the
current platform. This may be a single
character, such as ‘n’ for POSIX, or
multiple characters, for example,
‘rn’ for Windows. Do not use
os.linesep as a line terminator when
writing files opened in text mode (the
default); use a single ‘n’ instead,
on all platforms.
If specify test resp. binary properly when opening files, and use universal newlines, you shouldn’t have to worry about different newlines most of the time.
But if you have to, use os.linesep
os.linesep is important as it depends (as the name implied:)) on os.
E.g. on Windows, it is not “n” but rather “rn”.
But if you don’t care about multi-platform stuff you can just use ‘n’.
Is there an easy way to get the type of line ending that the current operating system uses?
Oh, I figured it out. Apparently, PEP-278 states the following:
Any line ending in the input file will be seen as a ‘n’ in Python, so little other code has to change to handle universal newlines.
If you are operating on a file that you opened in text mode, then you are correct that line breaks all show up as ‘n‘. Otherwise, you are looking for os.linesep .
From http://docs.python.org/library/os.html:
os.linesep
The string used to separate (or, rather, terminate) lines on the
current platform. This may be a single
character, such as ‘n’ for POSIX, or
multiple characters, for example,
‘rn’ for Windows. Do not use
os.linesep as a line terminator when
writing files opened in text mode (the
default); use a single ‘n’ instead,
on all platforms.
If specify test resp. binary properly when opening files, and use universal newlines, you shouldn’t have to worry about different newlines most of the time.
But if you have to, use os.linesep
os.linesep is important as it depends (as the name implied:)) on os.
E.g. on Windows, it is not “n” but rather “rn”.
But if you don’t care about multi-platform stuff you can just use ‘n’.