Read file into list and strip newlines

Question

I\'m having issues in reading a file into a list, When I do it only creates one item from the entire file rather than reading each element into its own field. I\'m using

Answer 1

This incorporates the strip directly into the for statement.

with open('drugs', 'r') as f:
  for line in map(lambda line: line.rstrip('\n'), f):
    print line

Or, if you know you don't need any space before or after text on a line, you can use this.

import string

with open('drugs', 'r') as f:
  for line in map(string.strip, f):
    print line

Answer 2

file.read() reads entire file's contents, unless you specify max length. What you must be meaning is .readlines(). But you can go even more idiomatic with a list comprehension:

with open('drugs') as temp_file:
  drugs = [line.rstrip('\n') for line in temp_file]

The with statement will take care of closing the file.

Answer 3

If you're okay with reading the entire file's contents into memory, you can also use str.splitlines()

with open('your_file.txt') as f:
    lines = f.read().splitlines()

splitlines() is similar to split('\n') but if your file ends with a newline, split('\n') will return an empty string at the very end, whereas splitlines() handles this case the way you want.