Replace \n with

Question

I'm parsing text from file with Python. I have to replace all newlines (\n) with
cause this text will build html-content. For example, here is some line from file:

'title\n'

Now I do:

thatLine.replace('\n', '<br />')
print thatLine

And I still see the text with newline after it.

Answer 1

For some reason using python3 I had to escape the "\"-sign

somestring.replace('\\n', '')

Hope this helps someone else!

Answer 2

thatLine = thatLine.replace('\n', '<br />')

Strings in Python are immutable. You might need to recreate it with the assignment operator.

Answer 3

To handle many newline delimiters, including character combinations like \r\n, use splitlines (see this related post) use the following:

'<br />'.join(thatLine.splitlines())

Answer 4

thatLine = thatLine.replace('\n', '<br />')

str.replace() returns a copy of the string, it doesn't modify the string you pass in.

Answer 5

Just for kicks, you could also do

mytext = "<br />".join(mytext.split("\n"))

to replace all newlines in a string with <br />.

Answer 6

You could also have problems if the string has <, > or & chars in it, etc. Pass it to cgi.escape() to deal with those.

http://docs.python.org/library/cgi.html?highlight=cgi#cgi.escape