On Tue, Jul 13, 2021 at 09:05:54AM -0700, Christopher Barker wrote:
> indeed. so if this idea is to be done (and there's something to be said for
> it), I think a similar option should be added to readlines as well --
> striping the newline.
I don't think that's as useful as you may expect. When processing lines
of text, we often want to strip *any* trailing whitespace, not just
newlines. So even if you strip the newline, you probably will still need
to strip trailing whitespace. So why bother with stripping the newline?
I think it will be extremely niche to want one but not the other.
> A couple other notes:
>
> This would highlight the whole "a string is an iterable of strings" problem
> :-( -- should strings be special cased? I think not, that's an issue that
> Python programmers have to learn at one point or another anyway.
Sorry, have I missed something? How is this relevant? We're talking
about a list of strings.
> As for whether it always puts in a newline, or if you can specify what you
> want to put in , I vote for the newline -- newlines are not the same on all
> platforms (though TextIO does translate), but I think it would get a bit
> confusing if someone explicitly put in "\n| and got "\r\n".
A precedent is str.splitlines:
splitlines(self, /, keepends=False)
Return a list of the lines in the string, breaking at line
boundaries.
Line breaks are not included in the resulting list unless
keepends is given and true.
except writelines (and readlines) would presumably reverse the default.
* readlines default to keeping the newlines
* writelines default to not appending newlines
> And the name IS writeLINES -- so why would anyone expect to use it for
> anything else -- we still have str.join() after all.
Repurposing functions to do something different from what the designers
imagined is very common.
--
Steve
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