python find if newline is in string

Question

I am trying to find if a "\n" character is in a string using this:

if "\n" in errors.text

This works fine for a string like "one\ntwo" but when the newline is at the end of the string like "one\n", it doesn't seem to work. I am using selenium to get this string from a website. Is it possible that it is not catching the newline at the end and simply not including it?

Or could this be the problem?

fixedText = errors.text.split("\n")[0]

I want the fixed text to remove all newlines and only get the first line of text. It works except for the case discussed above

well im getting the data from a website, so is it possible that it is not catching the newline at the end of the string from the website — rishubk
– rishubk, Commented Aug 1, 2015 at 7:05
If the string is literally \ and n, you should use "\\n" in errors.text or r"\n" in errors.text — falsetru
– falsetru, Commented Aug 1, 2015 at 7:07
Is there chance that the page does not contain newline at all? — falsetru
– falsetru, Commented Aug 1, 2015 at 7:22

TigerhawkT3 · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-01 07:48:31Z

4

If you want the fixed text to only be the first line in a string, you can do this:

if errors.text: # skips empty strings
    fixedText = errors.text.split("\n")[0]

This is because split() is reasonably robust:

>>> 'a'.split()[0]
'a'
>>> 'a\n'.split()[0]
'a'
>>> 'a\n1'.split()[0]
'a'
>>> ''.split()
[]

That last example demonstrates why we check for an empty string before trying to index the resulting list.

answered Aug 1, 2015 at 7:48

TigerhawkT3

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