how to remove last character of a string

[finer recliner]

I have a file of many words that looks something like this:

word1
word2
word3
etc

each word is a different length, and they all seem to have a trailing space (or some sort of non-printable character). Whats the easiest way to strip the last character (the space) from each line?

[stylishpants]

perl -ple 'chomp' /tmp/file

"chomp" only removes a single whitespace char if the string ends with one, so it's safer than 'chop', which always removes one char regardless of what it is.

[mike_g]

Depend what sort of language you are using. But if you want to modify the file itself you will need to write it out again (for simplicity sake).

In C you could do something like: Read in each character of the file, keeping track of the character before it. Basically you only write a character before once you have read the character infront of it first. If the front character is a newline and the back character is some form of whitespace then don't write it to the file, otherwise write it.

It would be easier in a higher level languages like Java. Then you could just read lines in as strings, trim them, then write back to a file.

[Can+~]

In C you could do something like: Read in each character of the file, keeping track of the character before it. Basically you only write a character before once you have read the character infront of it first. If the front character is a newline and the back character is some form of whitespace then don't write it to the file, otherwise write it.

In C you could, instead of looping for each character, using strlen (string.h) for each line and going backwards until you find the first non-space character and remove it.

I guess it would be even easier in python, as python comes with the OS and has all those fancy string functions.

[imdano]

Python's .strip() method or Java's .trim() method would probably be much easier to use than C.

[Can+~]

Python's .strip() method or Java's .trim() method would probably be much easier to use than C.

Uhm, python .strip() removes whitespaces (or any character specified on the parameters), he wants to remove a certain character at the end.

[imdano]

It only removes leading or trailing whitespace (or leading/trailing characters of the person's choice). You can use rstrip() to only remove trailing (or lstrip() for leading). It seems like that would fit his needs here.

[Can+~]

It only removes leading or trailing whitespace (or leading/trailing characters of the person's choice). You can use rstrip() to only remove trailing (or lstrip() for leading). It seems like that would fit his needs here.

Oh wait, I just re-read the initial post and yeah, I misunderstood. I thought he wanted to remove the "1, 2, 3" from the words. Duh.

Then it's a for line in file: line.rstrip() kind of thing.

[slavik]

perl -ple 'chomp' /tmp/file

"chomp" only removes a single whitespace char if the string ends with one, so it's safer than 'chop', which always removes one char regardless of what it is.

the answer has been given.

[finer recliner]

perl -ple 'chomp' /tmp/file

"chomp" only removes a single whitespace char if the string ends with one, so it's safer than 'chop', which always removes one char regardless of what it is.

i dont think the trailing character was a space (idk what it was), but using chop with your perl call did the trick.

thank you all for your suggestions!