String.strip() in Python

Question

While learning about python, I came upon this code, which takes a text file, splits each line into an array, and inserts it into a custom dictionary, where the array[0] is the k

Answer 1

In this case, you might get some differences. Consider a line like:

"foo\tbar "

In this case, if you strip, then you'll get {"foo":"bar"} as the dictionary entry. If you don't strip, you'll get {"foo":"bar "} (note the extra space at the end)

Note that if you use line.split() instead of line.split('\t'), you'll split on every whitespace character and the "striping" will be done during splitting automatically. In other words:

line.strip().split()

is always identical to:

line.split()

but:

line.strip().split(delimiter)

Is not necessarily equivalent to:

line.split(delimiter)