How can I remove a trailing newline?

Question

What is the Python equivalent of Perl\'s chomp function, which removes the last character of a string if it is a newline?

Answer 1

rstrip doesn't do the same thing as chomp, on so many levels. Read http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/chomp.html and see that chomp is very complex indeed.

However, my main point is that chomp removes at most 1 line ending, whereas rstrip will remove as many as it can.

Here you can see rstrip removing all the newlines:

>>> 'foo\n\n'.rstrip(os.linesep)
'foo'

A much closer approximation of typical Perl chomp usage can be accomplished with re.sub, like this:

>>> re.sub(os.linesep + r'\Z','','foo\n\n')
'foo\n'