Perl's chomp() equivalent for removing trailing newlines from strings in python

Starting with Python 2.2, you can use S.rstrip("\r\n") to remove all occurrences of any line terminator from the end of the string S without removing other trailing whitespace. If the string S represents more than one line, with several empty lines at the end, the line terminators for all the blank lines will be removed:

  >>> lines = ("line 1 \r\n" 
    ...          "\r\n" 
    ...          "\r\n") 
    >>> lines.rstrip("\n\r") 
    'line 1 ' 

Since this is typically only desired when reading text one line at a time, using S.rstrip() this way works well.

For older versions of Python, there are two partial substitutes:

• If you want to remove all trailing whitespace, use the rstrip() method of string objects. This removes all trailing whitespace, not just a single newline.
• Otherwise, if there is only one line in the string S, use S.splitlines()[0].