How to remove empty [''] from string in python from Text file

Question

file = open("file path", "r") 
links = file.read().split("\n")
print(links)

looks like this ['https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWTgK00SCKKNgpbsAgqzUxw/videos','https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dkl1K3mtHM', '']

I want it to be like this: ['https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWTgK00SCKKNgpbsAgqzUxw/videos','https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dkl1K3mtHM']

How can I achieve this? Are there any specific step i missed? How do i remove '' from the list

Original Text file: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWTgK00SCKKNgpbsAgqzUxw/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dkl1K3mtHM

Steven Fontanella · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-03 22:45:13Z

1

Files usually have a blank line at the end of them so you could manually remove the last item:

links = file.read().split("\n")[:-1]

the [:-1] means "everything up to and NOT including the last element".

Alternatively you can filter all blank lines (including in the middle) with:

links = [line for line in file.read().split("\n") if line and not line.isspace()]

We use list here because filter returns a generator. line and not line.isspace() means first that the line is not empty ('') and second that it doesn't consist only of space characters.

edited May 3, 2020 at 22:45

answered Mar 28, 2020 at 4:24

Steven Fontanella

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Viswa · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-28 04:34:10Z

1

In cases where the '' is not only at the end of the list, just iterate through the list while checking with a conditional while appending to a new list.

links = ['https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWTgK00SCKKNgpbsAgqzUxw/videos','https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dkl1K3mtHM', '']
new_links = []
for i in links:
    if i != '':
        new_links.append(i)
print(new_links)

This would return ['https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWTgK00SCKKNgpbsAgqzUxw/videos', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dkl1K3mtHM']

answered Mar 28, 2020 at 4:34

Viswa

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Binh · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-28 06:58:18Z

0

You can also use strip for this

file = open("file path", "r")
links = file.read().strip().split("\n")
print(links)

strip() is an inbuilt function in Python programming language that returns a copy of the string with both leading and trailing characters removed (based on the string argument passed).

answered Mar 28, 2020 at 6:58

Binh

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