Deleting a line from a file in Python

Question

I\'m trying to delete a specific line that contains a specific string.

I\'ve a file called numbers.txt with the following content:

Answer 1

Just for fun, here's a two-liner to do it.

lines = filter(lambda x:x[0:-1]!="tom", open("names.txt", "r"))
open("names.txt", "w").write("".join(lines))

Challenge: someone post a one-liner for this.

You could also use the fileinput module to get arguably the most readable result:

import fileinput
for l in fileinput.input("names.txt", inplace=1):
    if l != "tom\n": print l[:-1]