How to remove \n and \r from a string

Question

I currently am trying to get the code from this website: http://netherkingdom.netai.net/pycake.html Then I have a python script parse out all code in html div tags, and finally write the text from between the div tags to a file. The problem is it adds a bunch of \r and \n to the file. How can I either avoid this or remove the \r and \n. Here is my code:

import urllib.request
from html.parser import HTMLParser
import re
page = urllib.request.urlopen('http://netherkingdom.netai.net/pycake.html')
t = page.read()
class MyHTMLParser(HTMLParser):
    def handle_data(self, data):
        print(data)
        f = open('/Users/austinhitt/Desktop/Test.py', 'r')
        t = f.read()
        f = open('/Users/austinhitt/Desktop/Test.py', 'w')
        f.write(t + '\n' + data)
        f.close()
parser = MyHTMLParser()
t = t.decode()
parser.feed(t)

And here is the resulting file it makes:

b'
import time as t\r\n
from os import path\r\n
import os\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n'

Preferably I would also like to have the beginning b' and last ' removed. I am using Python 3.5.1 on a Mac.

Answer 1

A simple solution is to strip trailing whitespace:

with open('gash.txt', 'r') as var:
    for line in var:
        line = line.rstrip()
        print(line)

The advantage of rstrip() over using a [:-2] slice is that this is safe for UNIX style files as well.

However, if you only want to get rid of \r and they might not be at the end-of-line, then str.replace() is your friend:

line = line.replace('\r', '')

If you have a byte object (that's the leading b') the you can convert it to a native Python 3 string using:

line = line.decode()

Answer 2

One simple solution is just to strip off the last two characters of each line:

f = open('yourfile')
for line in f.readlines():
  line = line[:-2] # Removes last two characters (\r\n)
  print(repr(line))