Hi, Sorry I did not want to bother the group, but I really do not understand this seeming trivial problem. I am reading from a textfile, where each line has 2 values, with spaces before and between the values. I would like to read in these values, but of course, I don't want the whitespaces between them. I have looked at documentation, and how strings and lists work, but I cannot understand the behaviour of the following: line = f.readline() line = line.lstrip() # take away whitespace at the beginning of the readline. list = line.split(' ') # split the str line into a list
# the list has empty strings in it, so now, remove these empty strings for item in list: if item is ' ': print 'discard these: ',item index = list.index(item) del list[index] # remove this item from the list else: print 'keep this: ',item The problem is, when my list is : ['44', '', '', '', '', '', '0.000000000\n'] The output is: len of list: 7 keep this: 44 discard these: discard these: discard these: So finally the list is: ['44', '', '', '0.000000000\n'] The code above removes all the empty strings in the middle, all except two. My code seems to miss two of the empty strings. Would you know why this is occuring? Regards, Helvin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list